PROCESS: Vengeance

OpenCanvas 1.1 is a very cool little program, and it's free. As part of my "drive toward simplicity" I have started using OC more to color.

OC1.1 has two functional brushes: a Pencil (round, opaque) and a Watercolor (round, blends nicely). Honestly this is all you need! It also has an Eraser which I won't be using here, and a Blur Tool which I have never managed to do anything with.

I planned out the drawing very roughly - not really thinking about "making a cool picture" but just putting shapes together until they looked vaguely interesting.

The "sketch" is put on a new layer and the opacity taken down to around 5% - just enough to see where stuff is.

I decided it should be a night scene, so I Googled for photos of mountain areas at night time, and scribbled colors into OpenCanvas until I found something I liked. Here I have started roughing out the 3D shapes in the rock face, just making it up as I go along.

I am using OpenCanvas's Pencil tool to draw, and the Watercolor to apply color and blend it in. I'm working all on one layer.

Taking a shadow color I started to block in the shapes with the Watercolor, according to the light source.

I like to make colors less saturated (push towards gray) as I go into shadowed areas. The lighted areas of the rocks will have some blue in from the sky. I picked up the sky color with the eyedropper and brushed it on very faintly with the Watercolor.

I push the shadows deeper, keeping the direction of the light source always in mind.

The outermost face of the rock is fully exposed to moonlight. It gets bright light along its edges. The rock face curves inward so the middle area is partly shadowed by the outermost face.

The rock face does not need to be hyper detailed. The most detailed part of this painting will be the Lizalfos in the foreground. This is a trick to put more depth into an image: give closer elements more detail than faraway ones.

I took some time out to make a proper drawing of the characters, as that will make it easier for me to paint them.

Just like with the rocks, I try to shade the Lizalfos as 3D shapes according to the direction of the light source. I block everything in roughly before starting to apply detail.

One thing I have learned is that I always need stronger shadows than I actually apply :P I'm scared of being too dramatic.

Here's the detail! I use the pencil to scribble in scales around the forms, and apply some specific spots of brighter light to make the texture of their skin.

This is a nice tip for shading in OC. I use the Pencil to scribble in some opaque color, and then use the Watercolor very lightly to smooth over it and blend it in. I basically did the whole painting this way. You can see it above with the dark shadow on the blade.

The bright scale details were done with the pencil and no blending. It's sometimes better not to blend things.

Another weekly painting done :D

Email: quillandlauren@yahoo.com
AIM: eloze (email me first with your AIM name so I can add you)
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