Ognjen Sporin

Another Kobold Painting Process

Added 2021-05-18 07:35:32 +0000 UTC

Here's the process of another painting. I think this one took around 7 hours, and I painted it a bit differently than I do usually.

For most of my character paintings I have a lineart layer and place flat colors underneath (especially if I'm going for more saturation or patterns). After that I use multiply and soft light layers to get shadows and highlights, and then I just paint over that, but with that process I found the lineart isn't really so much help as it is a bit of a hassle to get rid of. So instead of having a literal drawing over top, I just use a fairy finished drawings as a reference and start painting more directly. This way I get the painterly quality organically instead of having to work for it by trying to paint out all the lines.

Here's the initial sketch for this character, it's very small, probably 5cm tall:

After that I often do another bigger sketch if I'm not certain about the design, the pose or some specific part that might be tough to work out and I don't want to keep erasing on my final drawing.

The final drawings I do traditionally are mostly A4 size, here are the ones I had done for the carrier character:

I also find it very useful to figure out the lighting in this stage as well, so that when I start painting all that's left to do is the local values/colors, the materials and the render/details.