Thorin Oakenshield

And now to the leader of our company, Thorin Oakenshield. I decided to do another take on the character portrait that we had to do for class. Last time I did mr Bond. This time, however, I decided to do another Tolkien character, namely Thorin, hence all the sketches that have been posted here lately. One reason for doing Thorin was of course that he is awesome, but another was that I wanted to do try out Justin Gerard's technique of painting digitally on top of a water colour painting. And he loves to do Tolkien-art, so I thought I should aswell for this project. That's enough yaking from me. Let's get to the painting (PS: More yaking to follow underneath the picture, which is about the process).

First off, I did some thumbnails that only I understand. And when that was said and done, I started to do some concepts. Most of them you've already seen, but the one posted here is the first one I did, which was done on the iApple Pad.

When all of that was tackled to the ground I did the line drawing, in which I also decided to do value as well, since I wasn't pressed for time.

That was sort of wasted time and effort, since I was doing a water colour underpainting the way Justin Gerard does it and that means that the painting is supposed to be monochromatic and therefore I would only need to think of value anyhow. I suppose it was good to have a better idea before diving into the painting, though.

I also used white gouache for the opaque highlights and some brown colour pencils on some touch ups here and there on the underpainting. I did mess it up a bit, since I pushed the lights and the darks too much. The darks were okay, but the highlights were way too light for the digital colouring to show through. Luckily for me, I managed to tone down the white in the painting enough for the colors to stick to the white (which was now no longer white).

I'm not going to lie, colouring it was hard. Trying to color it digitally was like attempting to lead a wild wolf through a sheep pen without it ending in a blood bath. However, I did find it quite enjoyable and I liked the result. Don't be surprised to see this technique be used again by me in the future. Hopefully with better understanding of what the heck I am doing.