Digital Painting Practice #2

                We're getting ready for our huge digital painting character environment, so this was our practice assignment: take a picture of a still life and create a Photoshop painting. 

Photo Reference (c) micalemer

30 min. block in

I wanted to do something atmospheric, and since I've had a thing for candles lately, that was my first thought.







      The easiest way for me to get a digital painting looking halfway decent is to go in 100% opacity and block in the color shapes with the solid circle brush. I work in a lot of layers, both traditionally and digitally painting. It's just never going to look good for the first three layers or so.

1 1/2 hr. rendering stage

I spent the rest of the 3 hours rendering the piece. From this point, I drop up and down in opacity and begin adding color gradients; I'm mostly using the fuzzy circle brush for this stage.

It's during this stage that I either make or break the piece - sometimes I go way overboard rendering, but I did my best to keep it looser than usual.

3 1/2 hr. finished piece