Enchanted Glade - Part 4

This is the final version of the Enchanted Glade illustration

It does look a lot different from the color rough, I painted over some of the smaller details and the trees don't look exactly the same, I thought the overall "feel" of the scene was more important, something otherwordly, if that's a word

I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough my process, I'll make another similar post in the future with more steps in the painting stage, I couldn't take pictures of this one.

Thanks a lot to Steve Prescott for all the help!

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com

Enchanted Glade - Part 3

Even though I liked the dragon sketch I did, it needed a few changes, the first thing I did was to use my very basic 3D knowledge to create a proper base for the statue.

I also decided to turn the statue the other way, I was surprised I didn't think of it before, this way the statue doesn't "escape" from the view. I also did the drawing again and it turned out much better. Well, the other one was just the sketch.

Finally I made a color rough just to show the basic values and color I'm going to use to my client, I heard an Art Director say that you should give an idea of what colors you're going to use to your AD, so I made this quick version, it was also a good reference for when I started painting the final.

The next part of the series is the last one, and I'll show the final version of the illustration.

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com

Enchanted Glade - Part 2

As I mentioned in the previous post, I thought that the fountains were looking too similar, besides that, I like the direction the process was going, so I thought I could include some different fountain designs too add more variety.

I started with some abstract fountain designs, but I didn't really like the result, then I thought that a dragon / serpent could be a good idea.

I also gave the trees different shapes, some are more twisted and weird while others are just straight, this way the client had a lot to choose from.

The client picked up the dragon sketch, next time I'll show the final drawing with the corrections I made and the color rough for the painting.

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com

Enchanted Glade - Part 1

I recently had to work on a full page illustration for a RPG, since I had enough time I decided to do the whole thing with acrylics.

I thought I could share my process in a series of posts, let's begin with the first step, thumbnails!

The idea was to create a fountain in the middle of a forest glade, it's a very vague description so I decided to add something to it.

I thought it would be interesting to add a naked figure as a statue in the fountain, that gives the viewer something to relate to and adds some narrative too, it could be the statue of a nymph or something similar that dwells in the forest.

After finishing these I thought that maybe they were all to similar, I decided to mix things up a little more in the sketch phase. I'll show those in the next post.

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com

Incite the Phantoms Process

Whenever I made a change in a piece that I'm not sure about I save it as a new JPG to compare with the last step, sometimes I end up going back (one of the good things about digital painting) and sometimes I don't, but I always end up with a bunch of JPGs that show my process.

I decided to do something fun with one of them and made this animated gif instead of the typical step by step tutorial, I'll do one of those eventually though, enjoy!

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com

Broken Cipher Color Roughs

Most of the time when I start an illustration I try to roughly figure out what colors I should use, I generally do 3 or 4 of these roughs.

These are the ones I used for the Broken Cipher illustration, I still like first one a lot, I think if the blue was a little more subtle it could've worked perfectly to contrast the light of the spell the shugenja is casting, maybe I'll use that color scheme for another illustration, you never know.

fgaona@felipegaona.com
felipegaona.com