The Lioness

Very often when I am getting ready to start a longer session of working on an illustration project I will do a small, quick painting to loosen up and relax. The following images show a start to finish piece that was completed recently. The first image shows the drawing on canvas with a tone of color applied.

The second image shows the painting about half way done. I've been working hard at trying to loosen up my paint application and trying to avoid nitpicking on every little detail.

Here is the final image with the background colors applied. The last details are added into the face here to try and focus on the content expression of the lioness.

Process

This is the first blog post under my revised portfolio website. I wanted to talk a bit about my working process and show some examples. This post shows you the preliminary steps for my current painting in progress, I Robot: Reason. I will be adding the final image once the painting is done.

First there are the thumbnails. Many, many thumbnails. 

I usually do a lot of sketching at this point. This is where I do most of my thinking. I try to get a lot of ideas down to work out the best image for the story. From here I will pick out my favorites and start cleaning up the sketch and figuring out the image details.

I started the final pencil drawings for this illustration several times. The drawing just wasn't coming out the way I envisioned it so I started over a few times.

At one point, the sketching was going so poorly that I decided to take a step back. I felt I needed to take some reference photos to help me get the right pose for the main figure. Spiderman was happy to help me out here. I posed Spidey and took a bunch of photos to work from. The final sketch worked out to my satisfaction after having the reference shots.

Once I have the final sketch drawn out I will typically scan this in and do some studies digitally. I have gotten into the habit of creating a comprehensive value study. This way I know exactly where I want all the light and darks to go. I usually will also do a color study in Photoshop. Working digitally allows me to try different color schemes very quickly. 

This shows you my pre-painting process. Once I'm comfortable with the up-front work, I will transfer the drawing to canvas and start painting the illustration in oils. I will continue to show this process in a new post where I will show in progress images of the painting.