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Description

As always, these are little step by step ramblings of how I went about painting and how everything came together. If anyone has any questions or clarifications on a stage, please ask! Also - there is no right or wrong way to paint! This is just how I created this particular piece - I hope it helps in some way.

Bear with me, this was a bit of a long one. Final piece took around 40 hours!

1 - Planning out the composition using just values. This was pretty much just on one layer to get a feel of where I wanted to go with this piece.

2- Changed Guts' pose. The Dragonslayer is a massively heavy greatsword, and I wanted to convey the weight of it, so hunching Guts over more helps portray this. I also swapped the legs over to have him sliding in the snow towards Zodd as he prepares his swing.

3 - Sticking with just my values, I started to paint over the top of everything, getting some idea of where my light would be coming from. Zodd has black fur and Guts has black armour, so there's a lot of black in this piece. But keeping in mind the distance and natural lighting, the black on Zodd will be a lot darker than the black on Guts as Zodd is closer to the viewer.

4 - I'm including this step as it's just a lovely little trick for adding initial colour. This was just me messing about with a couple of different Gradient Overlay layers, and trying different things until I came up with something I liked. I painted over some of the shadows facing the ground with a paler blue as there will be reflected light from the snow bouncing back upwards.

5 - I got rid of the green! Haha, I couldn't really make it work in this scene as it didn't make a lot of sense. Painting ontop of everything again (I really didn't use layers effectively in this piece!) I started to just get some initial detailing down. With Guts, I'm not really considering colour at the moment, just using values with the strange rust colour I've ended up with (which i change later) For the snow background here, I've just taken a photo texture of snow and chucked it down and painted over parts to get some idea of how I want things to look.

6 - Further detailing. Went over Guts with colour layers to remove that orange, and introduced some blues instead.

7 - Zodd's pose was waaay too stretched out and illogical, so I moved his butt over a bit so it makes more sense. Detail work on his fur and added some snow effects over everything on separate layers for dynamism and help portray movement. I turn these layers off while working so they're not affected by anything.

8 - Changed Zodd's hand as it was aggravating me. Detailing the swords, detailing and colour tweaks as a whole

9 - Zodd's hand changed again. I was really not getting on with this hand! Further detailing.

10 - Final touches. That closest sword was not working, so moved it super close (must be on a hill with the perspective!) and blurred it to help with distance. Painted the snow, final texture additions on the dragonslayer, cape, fur, Zodd's eye, etc. And of course, final colour and level tweaks and a little sharpen!

Final piece -

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Follow me on Instagram - www.instagram.com/fleeting_emb…

Description

As always, these are little step by step ramblings of how I went about painting and how everything came together. If anyone has any questions or clarifications on a stage, please ask! Also - there is no right or wrong way to paint! This is just how I created this particular piece - I hope it helps in some way.

Bear with me, this was a bit of a long one. Final piece took around 40 hours!

1 - Planning out the composition using just values. This was pretty much just on one layer to get a feel of where I wanted to go with this piece.

2- Changed Guts' pose. The Dragonslayer is a massively heavy greatsword, and I wanted to convey the weight of it, so hunching Guts over more helps portray this. I also swapped the legs over to have him sliding in the snow towards Zodd as he prepares his swing.

3 - Sticking with just my values, I started to paint over the top of everything, getting some idea of where my light would be coming from. Zodd has black fur and Guts has black armour, so there's a lot of black in this piece. But keeping in mind the distance and natural lighting, the black on Zodd will be a lot darker than the black on Guts as Zodd is closer to the viewer.

4 - I'm including this step as it's just a lovely little trick for adding initial colour. This was just me messing about with a couple of different Gradient Overlay layers, and trying different things until I came up with something I liked. I painted over some of the shadows facing the ground with a paler blue as there will be reflected light from the snow bouncing back upwards.

5 - I got rid of the green! Haha, I couldn't really make it work in this scene as it didn't make a lot of sense. Painting ontop of everything again (I really didn't use layers effectively in this piece!) I started to just get some initial detailing down. With Guts, I'm not really considering colour at the moment, just using values with the strange rust colour I've ended up with (which i change later) For the snow background here, I've just taken a photo texture of snow and chucked it down and painted over parts to get some idea of how I want things to look.

6 - Further detailing. Went over Guts with colour layers to remove that orange, and introduced some blues instead.

7 - Zodd's pose was waaay too stretched out and illogical, so I moved his butt over a bit so it makes more sense. Detail work on his fur and added some snow effects over everything on separate layers for dynamism and help portray movement. I turn these layers off while working so they're not affected by anything.

8 - Changed Zodd's hand as it was aggravating me. Detailing the swords, detailing and colour tweaks as a whole

9 - Zodd's hand changed again. I was really not getting on with this hand! Further detailing.

10 - Final touches. That closest sword was not working, so moved it super close (must be on a hill with the perspective!) and blurred it to help with distance. Painted the snow, final texture additions on the dragonslayer, cape, fur, Zodd's eye, etc. And of course, final colour and level tweaks and a little sharpen!

Final piece -

-----------------------
Follow me on Instagram - www.instagram.com/fleeting_emb…