Birdsong 3 tutorial

Again, cover illustration for Birdsong [link] . Still not finished, maybe. I don't know. Maybe give her a weapon? There are quite a lot of things going on already...

Step 1: Base on the colour sketch and value study I did ealier, block in colours and shapes. Fixed the head problem I had before.

Step 2: Added more details including her hand. Repainted her suit to make sure light and dark have different saturations so that it looks real.

Step 3: The original idea was using the background blue to contrast her warm skin colour, but now the blue seems a bit flashy. So I desaturated the background into some sort of gray. Changed the girl’s expression a bit so she’s not that mean. Defined her arms a bit more.

Step 4: Fixed the bird’s neck so it is not that fat. The monster crow wasn’t looking evil enough, so I gave it more eyes and a better beak- I think the fun part of painting in this style is that you can change the design whenever you want.

Step 5: Finish off everything else. I gave the top corners a dark gradient so that the evil eyes and her hair can be more eye-catching. But then I realized the picture is a bit top-empty. Fix that problem with a little decoration on her hair.

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Tool tips: I used only ArtRage 3 for this picture. The brushes I used are:

Normal oil, just to start with quickly. It doesn’t have much thickness like thick oil or react with canvas texture like dry oil. Simple.

Thick oil, the brush I use most of the time. So far only small thick oil has nice sharp brush strokes (big thick oil doesn’t create sharp textures as the small one). Colour blends really well with this brush.

Paint Tube + Palette Knife, used for creating thick, interesting textures. The Paint Tube tool should be better designed though.

Airbrush, well… airbrush has never been a painting tool to me. Most people use airbrush, I personally think, in the wrong way. We can give AR airbrush blending mode as well, so give it ‘linear dodge’ we get dodge tool, give it ‘multiply’ we get darken tool, and give it ‘colour’ we get tint tool… etc. Powerful as that. I think the airbrush tool would be better if it doesn’t have a solid centre area (colour disappear at about 60% of the size).