Seer Walkthrough And Closeups

This is a step by step of my recent painting: [link]

Step 1: I sketched out my basic idea, cleaned it up then made a new layer underneath my sketch to start painting. First off, I fill out any skin areas with a 40% gray, then I add a light base of shadows with a 50% gray using pen pressure - if you don't have a tablet and are working with a mouse, it's still possible to paint as well as you would with a tablet but it does require a lot more patience. You've got to lower the opacity on your brush and carefully go over where you want your shadows. The sketch looks strange to me, the facial proportions are off and I'm aware of that but hopefully the shadows I add later will clean some of it up.

Step 2: Blending. I used to blend by going over a hard area and taking samples with the eyedropper tool, but that was just so tedious and I found that usually it took the contrast out of my paintings. Now I blend by using a custom smudge brush and Gaussian blur, in this step I simply used the lasso tool to select small parts of the face (I.e a cheek, the top of the nose, the chin - BUT NOT ALL AT THE SAME TIME) then feathered it at about 150 (I was working with a very large canvas) and Gaussian blurred it into a smooth, nicely blended face.

Step 3: I'm adding darker shadows now, about a 80% gray, and slight highlights (since I wanted this to be a darker painting, I didn't focus so much on the highlights as I did the shadows). Again, the face looks strange, the proportions aren't what they should be - but still I continue without changing them, hoping that my shadows will fix some of what's wrong.

Step 4: I blend some of the shadows, especially around the nose and used my custom smudge brush to smooth out the highlights. I'm more focused on the eyes at this point. I do a bit of a sketch for the background, its very lazy and not all to definable but my guess is those were supposed to be trees lol.

Step 5: I used Gaussian blur to blend the darker shadows and I begin adding detail around the eyes, nose and mouth.

Step 6: I take a very dark gray (almost black) and fix my shadows around the cheek, nose and eyes (filling the eyes in). Also, as you can see, I shortened the face by a good 100 pixels using free transform.

Step 7: Hair! I take a normal soft edged brush, set it to size and opacity by pen pressure and begin mapping out the hair. I tried several different shades for the hair, from white to pitch black and finally settle with something in between. I used stark white to do the highlights after I was done. I used the same brush settings (only changing the size) throughout the entire hair process. lol. If you're using a mouse, you can use a regular brush and just lower the opacity (you'll have to go over it a lot to get the proper effect) or you can use 'Fade' - though I wouldn't recommend it - in the brush settings OR you can use the pen tool.

Step 8: Background! I didn't work very hard on this background, I'll admit. I added the snow with a scattered brush and screwed around with several ideas on how to make it work. I added more detail in the hair, fixed the shoulder area, darkened the overall painting using Curves.

Step 9: I Gaussian blurred (yes, I know, I'm obsessed with Gaussian blur) the background, took some contrast out of it and got rid of the pathway like thing in the middle of it by just going over it with a light gray. I copied my skin layer, set it to multiply and take the opacity down to about 40% to darken it up, to add that feathery effect, I blurred it as well. You'll notice that the eye has those funny little things around it, I just added those with a regular brush on pen pressure, blurred them and darkened the area around the eye - again. lol.

Step 10: Finally! I add snow with a scattered brush, then motion blurred it fairly well in a semi-sideways direction. I add little, barely noticeable touch ups everywhere, screwed with the background some more and viola! 'tis finally done!

Close ups are of the left eye, the shoulder covered with hair and finally the face.

NOTE: If you have any questions at all about how I do this, etc, feel free to ask me via comment or note! I'll always be more than happy to help with something!

Painting by me.