Fantasy Heads 7 (with step by step)
Alright SO.. Bit of a long story behind this today haha. First of all it was meant to be completed yesterday - but I was feeling really under the weather and far too tired to complete it (bad night sleep) so continued it today as I didn't want it to be a rush job or done badly yesterday. And everything that could've gone wrong, *did*. There were multiple other heads that I scratched, couldn't get the composition to look right or what heads I chose in the end to harmonise together. Also had problems with some rendering and some general procrastination with the whole thing. So while I'm happy with the end result, it was definitely a mess in the making. So far these study pages usually take anywhere from 5-8 hours but this one definitely took nearly 10 hours I would say. I did however do a step by step of the Smaug study as it kept me from procrastinating and also finalising my workflow a bit! I'm hoping that provides a bit of use to any of you seeing this too!
(Original works by Vladimir Alexandrow, Kurtis Dawe, Keita Okada and Emre Ekmekci)
basic light and shadow blocking
Sketch, not detail, enough to get mostly the silhouette and feature placement right
A single layer with a base colour, that I can then use masks and clips on (although this painting is all painted on one layer)
Cast shadow rough placement. This doesn't include core shadows or ambient occlusion shadows which are the darkest. I do add some small amount of subsurface scattering however
Highlights
Core shadows, refining some of the shadows and other details, start to blend things together
Colour adjustment, and start of the rendering stage. This is where I pay attention to the details of the study, however I don't do exact copies and often change or shift elements from the original to make it more challenging or fun
More adjustment
Level adjustment, more rendering, smaller details and adding an overall gradient to tie the lighting together. There is a strong light overhead, so aside strong cast shadows, there is quite a bit of light drop off that will be visible throughout the piece
Final adjustments, adding a bloom to the top plane, as the light is strong enough to "bounce"