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.
