Artemis - Process

Painting this piece, once I had the sketch down was reasonably straightforward. As ever, I began with the background (eat your greens, first!) before going onto the fun of painting all of the characters.

With a lot of these pieces it's a balance between painting the bits of the background you'll see in the finished piece versus painting the whole background, some of which will be hidden behind the characters. In this piece I decided it would be quicker and easier to hide all my character layers and just do the whole background.  In that way objects like the sofa are coherent, and whatever it is in the background left of the picture (I imagined some kind of machine that had some MSA Millennium masks plugged into it - a kind of fetish hookah, maybe?) would make some kind of visual sense in the final piece.

As you can see from the process I was only sure what colour I wanted to use for certain things - flesh tones, the schoolgirl outfit in the background. So, I committed to painting everything in greyscale first and visiting the colour stuff later.  Painting in greyscale does mean I only have to concentrate on the light, shade, contrast and forms and ensures a great tonal balance in the final painting, but adding colour in later can sometimes lend itself to a bit of a colour-washed look (like the old overpaints of black and white photos with watercolours that you saw in the early 20th century) so I try to only lean on this technique where it feels right.  It's also tricky to get the look of items like coloured latex (like red or green) using that method so if you look back on my other paintings you'll see that where I do have a really clear idea of what colours I'm using I dive in and paint in colour.

So with the greyscale painting done I attacked the background with various colour gradients and built up additional layers of lighting and colour casts to the entire scene to pull things together.

If anyone's interested in the techniques I use to apply colour to greyscale stuff, I watched a great little video from YouTuber Marc Brunet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDB-25rweM8 that does a really good job of explaining how this works.  It's not a perfect solution, for best results it's good to do some extra over-painting afterwards, or, like I do, work up the pieces of the painting where you know exactly what you want from the colour in a piece. But if you're learning digital painting and want to find a great way of making a process more streamlined and therefore creating better results because you only have to worry about one step of a painting at a time, it's worth trying out.