Diannara and Digital Painting

Hey everyone! HAPPY HALLOWEEN

I’ve being doing some commission work! A friend hooked me up with a game development streamer on Twitch who needed overlay art for his stream. He used to play World of Warcraft and wanted his night elf character drawn and painted as channel art.

I had to step back into the digital painting style

Digital painting is still very new for me, no matter how many video game textures I’ve painted. You have to sculpt shapes and surfaces using the brush tool, totally different than sculpting geometry in a 3d program.

Diannara sneak peek

With this piece, I wanted to use full color and be able to sculpt defined volumes. So the technique I used was starting out with grey scale so I can get the shadows and surfaces right, then paint colors over it using the blendmodes in Photoshop.

Gray scale

The blendmodes were a clutch move, because I could easily change colors and send multiple color scheme options for the client. Because colors in the blendmode layer can end up slightly different than what you expect, you may have to tweak the colors. If you want a gold, you cant just lay down yellow and call it a day, you have to use a slight different golden/brown, and even then you have to tweak it still because of the other colors you have blending under it.

Either way, I’m excited to post the final piece (with permission from the Client) to my illustration gallery!

Stay tuned, and thanks for sticking around!

(the continuation of my portfolio story from Oct 4 is coming soon)