Gandalf digital painting tutorial – step 03: Basic features/facial structure
Here I’m blocking in the nose/cheek bone, beard etc.
It’s good to use a soft round brush for this as these areas curve and graduate, fade etc.
Throw down your basic highlights and basic shadows. Later it will all be moved about.
Gandalf digital painting tutorial – step 04: First detailing
As this is a speed painting, we can do some fairly quick detail to capture the essence and that will be all we need. We’re trying to capture the reference rather than replicate it 100%.
I began with his left eye. This was done very quickly and was just a few brush strokes. As his eye is very minimal in the ref, it was easy to recreate. It had very obvious ‘landmark’ features like the hard highlights which make it easy to describe the form. If your ref has crap lighting then it’s up to you to somehow describe the form – not an easy task!
During the whole process his nose took a few bashings. I used liquify to push and pull it into place.
Gandalf digital painting tutorial – step 05: Further detailing
More work on his nose. At this point I started to change the workspace around so the ref and the canvas were side-by-side to see how things lined up that way. I was way off on the nose so squished it around again.
I also noticed, upon close observation, that his eyes were not in sync on the horizontal plane (when the canvas and ref were again stacked one above the other).
So this is a necessary step. Double check everything is lining up and in correct proportion. I will then tend to lasso around the offending part and copy it onto a new layer, then move it around until it’s fixed. I then may need to just airbrush erase the hard edge from the lasso to make it sit back in seemlessly.
I worked out some basic wrinkles and finished his right eye and cheekbone plus the shadow under his nose. Oh and his eyebrows, they were tricky too in terms of making sure they lined up with the ref.
Gandalf digital painting tutorial – step 06: Mouth and hair detail
Ok, so grab your hair brushes here!
NOTE ABOUT BRUSHES: So these are two brushes I picked up along the way, while I didn’t make the source images I tweaked them to work better than the originals in terms of brush set-up.
It’s really simple. The hair brushes provided have an opacity fade when used with your tablet. Use this fade to create the effect (see top examples in the above image) and for an even greater effect you can switch on ‘shape dynamics’ in the brush options. This I have set to size: pen pressure, so you don’t have to tweak anything, just check the box.
To get the fine strands I used the second brush, made it very small and turned on the shape dynamics. It makes for excellent whisps.
It terms of hair brushes, I can’t imagine needing any more than this. You may even get away with just using the second brush for long hair as the first seems mainly useful for shorter hair.
Finally I painted the mouth. I set the canvas side-by-side again with the ref. Pretty simple.
Conclusion
There are definitely a few mistakes in terms of accuracy of this painting but it was meant to be a speed study taking no longer than 2.5 hours – which is how long it took. So all-in-all I’m pleased with how it turned out. Plus I leared a few things about hair.
Right, that’s me done. Hope you got something out of this tutorial, if you did then please comment and let me know my time has been well spent
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