Making of Clara by Simon Persson, Sweden



Hello all people, my name is Simon and I’m quite new in this area. I have been doing digital graphics since I bought my first tablet which is for two years now. At the moment I’m studying digital graphics for game development in Malmö, Sweden at The Game Assembly.

This is an explanation of the making of Clara and how I like to draw my pictures. That mean that it’s not necessarily the best or the most correct way to paint. What works for me don’t need to work for you. I will not dive too deep into explanation of the different stages, consider this as a summary and feel free to use what you think is handy.

Background

It all started as a project for practicing skin values and how to paint hair. It was also a gift for a friend of mine. I had some photos given to me and I choose what I considered to be the most expressive one. My idea was to paint realistic but painterly like an oil painting and also add some changes from the reference photo.

The Process

I first started to block out the most elementary shapes. I think it’s of great importance to already in the sketchy stage trying to get the proportions right. That will save time since you don’t need to edit the basic shapes later on when you’re in a higher level of details.

I prefer to start paint the face. In this case it’s the most important part of the painting because you want the viewers’ attention to this area. There are lots of ways to choose a color palette but I like to use what I call “the color picking technique”. It’s exactly what the name tells. You pick the color from an already existing photo, drawing, etc. I prefer to use photos as you naturally in nature have a very good balance of colors that I consider makes a really good palette to play with. In this case I color picked from the reference photo. At this stage don’t worry about the color scheme you can always tweak it to your liking during the process and you will probably do that before finishing the painting.

To paint skin I use two brushes. Airbrush Pen Opacity Flow and Airbrush Soft Round. I start to paint with Airbrush Pen Opacity Flow, 100% opacity and flow with a middle tone color. After that I paint the darker and lighter areas with darker and brighter colors. To blend the colors I use the Airbrush Soft Round brush with opacity 30- 40% and flow 100%. I color pick colors from the photograph and simply keep on doing this over and over till I have a good blended spectrum of colors for my skin. I never use total black or white for shadings and highlights, in real life you almost never have these colors. Keep in mind to maintain some brushstrokes; it will give more life to the painting.

For the hair I used one color to start with. As Clara is black-haired it was good to start with nearly total black for the base. I created a new layer on top of the skin layer and with a big brush I blocked out the shape of the hair. With the eraser I removed the areas that were wrong. I started here to paint the garland of flowers and as before I basically blocked out the silhouette of the garland. I used very strong colors to start with but later when I defined the flowers I also made them more transparent and blurry to get rid of the feeling that they are too solid.