The lighting on his left leg was bothering me. With the sun at that angle, his right leg would be casting a shadow on his left so I painted it in. I added a curves and hue/saturation adjustment layer to make him pop just a little more. I moved to the background layer and adjusted the levels to a cool violet. Then I painted in the colors and clouds into the sunset.
I started in with the boulders, as the subject of this illustration is the idea of some kind of destroyer angel/demon being unleashed from a stone prison or cocoon in an explosive manner. Lots of loose brushing at various opacity, with some scatter brush texturing. I wanted to avoid using any photographic textures for this and keep it 100% Photoshop painting.
I took the layer with the smallest stones and ran a radial zoom blur filter at a value of 10, then took the medium-sized rocks and ran the same filter at 5. I really like the energy this motion blur gives to the painting.
I painted the shading and wrinkles on the (tunic, I guess?) and gave him a waistband with a kind of wizard-language gibberish written across it. I added some blue flames to his sword by painting a jagged shape of blue, burning and dodging it, then using Filter > Distort > Wave, and then Edit > Fade Wave at 50%. I did this several times, airbrush erased here and there, then set the layer blending mode to Linear Dodge (Add). After minor tweaks here and there, shuffling stones around and some color and level adjustments, I think I’ll call this one finished.
1 comment:
The boulders are very well done. They add a great depth of field.
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