Making of Twisted Mind of Puyuhby Leong Wan Kok, Malaysia Web: www.1000tentacles.com



Hi, I’m WanKok. I have been involved in art industry for almost 12 years. Over my career path, I’ve been exposed to different techniques of creating digital art work for game industry, post production and publishing company. These experiences have somehow helped build up my personal way of rendering a scenes. In this tutorial, I’m happy to share my techniques and will walk you through the many steps I take, from initial conceptual work to final rendering.

Basically, this tutorial divides into 5 main sections: Brain Storming; Prior to Coloring; Coloring; Texturing; Final Touch Up. Each step of the way will be accompanied by WIP art works and shall also explain the tools and methods I used.

As always, it is vital to know what’s your artistic direction prior to painting. What kind of style, design element, the canvas size, final output file format, etc. These are essential. If you have not received any brief from your art director, ASK! If this is your personal project, I strongly advice you to plan out one. This will indefinitely save you time in the end.

Brain Storming

Read the design brief carefully. Design your character and roughly work out some thumbnails, rough and fast. Get the overall feel for it. If time permits, develop your characters. Think of the environment they dwell in, what kind of climate and clothing they wear? What’s their characteristic? Consider these questions and slowly you will start to “feel” for your painting. I believe this will make the painting more interesting and thus has a “longer read”. For my case, since this Twisted Mind of Puyuh is a front cover for my comic, I basically know what kind of composition, characters and direction I need to draw/achieve.



Prior to Coloring

Once the layout is done, get it scanned. Usually I go with 300dpi, grey scale.


Coloring

On top of the layer, open a new one. Choose “paint bucket” (type ‘G’) and fill the whole canvas with a suitable darker tones. Here I go with warm brown for the basic coat. Turn the layer to “multiply” (under layer), so that the underneath layer is still visible. For personal liking, I always start coloring the characters first, then background, an “inside out” method. This way enables me to judge the colors’ relation more precisely. Constantly change your brush’s opacity. I love to work somewhere around 20-50%, “flow” sets to 68%. It builds up the color nicely this way IMHO.