PROCESS: Munroe // sfw

this is the process pack for this painting; download the attached .zip below, it contains 28 (!) pngs and 1 gif!

a recent equine monster of the month gave me the urge to draw my kelpie, munroe; i envisioned an underwater scene of him moving through the stems of waterlilies and other plants, painting a rather ill-boding view of what lurks below the surface (sorry to anyone who has a fear of deep waters...).

step one was sketching the basic idea and composition, and step two was settling on a swimming pose. i rather enjoy drawing swimmy/floaty poses, but it can still be tricky to make them look natural. this time it went really well, although i had to sort of pause to recall exactly how i draw his weird mix of anatomy. kelpies are essentially equine, but his monster form doesn't exactly look like a normal white horse. at the basic level of his musculature and skeleton it's got more predatorial features mixed into it, not to mention that some of his features are just plain weird: his hunched neck, gills, monstrous hands instead of front hooves, the bony protrusions along his spine, a mixture of short fur and scales, the seaweed and plants growing from his mane and tail, his very non-equine mouthful of sharp teeth...

the trickiest part of posing him was honestly drawing his mane and tail. even with my cintiq i find it a bit difficult to draw long, smooth, flowing lines, plus it's a challenge to capture that relaxed floatyness of underwater hair even when it's not long as heck. i went for a pretty stylized approach, drawing his tresses of hair in a way that looked neat and compositionally sound, restraining myself from adding too many details (since that could make it look more stiff).

the background would be a pretty important part of this picture, so i wanted to lay the groundwork for it early on. not only would it set the underwater stage, it also would determine the overall light, mood, and colour scheme of the whole picture. the colouring of the character would have to look good against the background, it would have to match it in terms of temperature and saturation and such. if i had painted the character first, against a white or otherwise plain colour, there's a risk that the colouring would have looked good by itself, but that it might have looked out of tune with the background once i added it; the saturation, hues, and lighting could easily have been mismatched. i didn't finish the entire background immediately, but i laid the groundwork before even starting to colour munroe, giving me a backdrop to colour the character against.

speaking of which, i first added the base colours, as per usual; i started out with two layers, one for his body and another for his mane and tail. munroe is technically a white horse, but with murky and creepy-looking green undertones, due to his association with lakes and marshes. as you can see i chose very green base colours, in line with the underwater colour scheme and lighting; i planned to paint on top of it with both lighter and darker hues, so i knew it wouldn't look as green in the end. i used both various (more or less textured) paintbrushes and the lasso select + airbrush/gradient technique to render his body, adding shadows and highlights and texture and details, not least the faint dappling and the hints of scales.

i left his coat like that for a bit, and moved on to his mane and tail. i went back and forth a bit on exactly which hue his hair should be. at first i had it the same shade as his coat but gradually fading towards a marshy green at the tips, but i found that i better liked the look of it when his whole mane and tail was a somewhat darker green hue, fading towards black at the ends. i used the lasso select + gradient method to colour his hair, because i wanted it to look crisp and light; i didn't want to add too many details or too much texture to "weigh it down," if that makes sense? i kept the layers of hair in mind while colouring it, selecting different tresses and giving them slightly different hues, making his mane and tail look less like a solid mass and more ... alive? i added smaller and smaller details in both darker and lighter colours, and eventually painted the long strands of underwater plants that intermingle with his hair.

i also used my trusted old lasso select + airbrush/gradient method to shade his body and hair. i selected the areas i wanted to shade and used a dark blue-green hue to paint on the shadows; i set the layer to multiply and adjusted the transparency. it made for quite a dramatic difference, especially when i also added the highlight along the upper side of his body and hair. i did this by airbrushing a pale colour onto his upper outline, setting the layer to "overlay," and adjusting the transparency until it looked like the light from above the surface was reaching him. finally, i used pale blues to add reflective light along the underside of his body, and finished the work on the character by cleaning up the lines, adding some details, emphasizing important lines, and so on.

the final step consisted of finishing the background. i worked in layers--foreground, middle ground, background--and utilised the gaussian blur effect and the use of different hues (paler for the background, darker for the foreground) to create field of depth. i added some particles floating around in the water, adjusted the lighting a little bit, and that was pretty much it.

it was a joy to paint such an athmospheric picture and i really do want to do that more. i have so many characters i could draw in their natural element...

// art + character © me.