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Dettmer In reply to Platinar [2013-11-11 02:31:50 +0000 UTC]

I wish I had an easy simple answer to your question, but it's not easy to put down in words. I would love to take you through step by step, layer by layer, and explain the thought process. It's an intuitive process, where lines and marks become symbolic. I differ drawing and painting from eachother, specially speedpainting, where I aim to stay away from getting stuck detailing. I try to put down large marks on the canvas, and create shapes with hard edges. As soon as you find yourself zooming, and spending time on polishing up something, you loose sight of the bigger picture, and of time. -Even your edges, and you end up with an odd soft image. 

I started painting forests, cause I drew a comically atrocious forest once. I spend some time finding photos of interesting forests that I could speedpaint. Winter, summer, spring, jungle, swamp, pines, etc. Then I forced myself to work in small scale. 600x800 px, so zooming became almost impossible. Keeping the bigger image in perspective all the time, only refining things that I had time to shape out. I started getting more ambience into my pictures, and got to understand that trees aren't just brown trunks with green tops. The amount of warm or cool greys on a trunk is surprising. The texture and shape isn't just cylinders stuck in the ground, with a "lined" texture. I did about 12 of these photo reffed paintings, which took 35 mins to 1 hour each. 

In this picture, which isn't aiming for realism, I was testing some color theory, which is why it's a mirrored image. I simply liked 2 hue-versions, and wanted to combine them.

I dont use many fancy brushes, although it looks like it. I advocate learning to use just the regular set of hard round brushes, and maybe making them oval (squeezing them into a line). Texture brushes are not a shortcut, unless you can already make the texture manually. You get hung up on using texture brushes, cause this and that looks cool when you try it, and quickly everything becomes over textured, or looses it's value.

I also usually start off in black and white. Get some solid shapes and edges in there. Diffuse the light later, and push back background elements. 

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Platinar In reply to Dettmer [2013-11-13 10:19:49 +0000 UTC]

Fantastic! This was so helpful I will try applying some of it to my own drawings

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Dettmer In reply to Platinar [2013-11-13 19:58:30 +0000 UTC]

Doh, here's the link fav.me/d6u49qd

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Platinar In reply to Dettmer [2013-11-13 22:22:54 +0000 UTC]

Looks awesome! Thank's for the advice!

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Dettmer In reply to Platinar [2013-11-13 19:57:59 +0000 UTC]

Here is the layer-by-layer of most of the process. Looks a mess

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