Copper Kidd step-by-step

Hey everybody! More people have been asking for Step-By-Step's, so here is one of the Copper Kidd via Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.

I want to say you should use your choice of brushes. Its a combination of soft and hard brushes through the whole process. Familiarize yourself with what the brushes can do for you, and which ones are best for your process.

1. I start off by making my drawing. Really figuring out now what things should be in the painting and the pose for the character because changing things later can be a real pain.
2. Making sure the drawing is one layer, I change it to a Multiply mode. Now blocking in the colors underneath on a bottom layer, neatness is not required...
3. From this point on I will be working in layers above the drawing with blocked in colors. Creating a 3rd layer, I begin placing in some dark areas where the focus of the paint will not be needed. I usually use black at 30% opacity. Remembering to consider reflected lighting, I start to render shapes.
4. Now some lights can be added. A few layers may be needed to achieve this. I find the modes Overlay, Soft Light, and Normal can work well. And feeling confident in the art direction, I go ahead and render in some textures and details as well.
5. This frame shows some finer rendering of details and textures in the face and armor. The eyes are bothering me so I fix them. But this is simply repeating step 4. I also work on the reflected lighting.
6. I notice the forearm coming towards us is too long so I shorten that. This oversight is an easy fix. I simply use the 'lasso' tool and 'copy merged', then 'paste in place'. Now it is just simply moving it back to look correct. I paint over the details of the former hand and change the knee armor while I'm painting the fixes. It doesn't look right either.
7. Looking over the paint and I observe how it is reading from far away. The background has a bit too much contrast and his side is 'popping' too much. Those are both darkened some more. Also his pointy metal head is a little too hard to see as well so I build up the contrast a little bit more. I also increase the lighting on his face to really make it the focus.
8. As I paint more towards the end, I begin working tighter and tighter. Little shadows and highlights are added here and there to help define shapes and textures. I also add some blue light in the reflected light areas for contrast. I also subtly add some blue over the orange colors using 'overlay' to mute the purity of the orange to make the copper more readable.
9. I add some lighting to his forehead so it reads better and fix the lighting in his eyes as well. To make his blue forearm that is closest to us read better I add some highlights on that too. I am careful to not add too much contrast, because the face is the point of interest.
10. The head seems to have too much contrast at this point and the overall shape is still bothering me. So I adjust some shadows and highlights to better define the shape of the head. I like it. Also I notice the metal hand could use some definition on the palm. At this point all I did was clean up the edge work and textures. Some edges were hard, some were soft. I even added some lost edges where the paint needed no attention. Done.

There it is. I hope it helps anyone painting characters ^_^



See my previous Copper Kidd Blog http://joshburnsart.blogspot.com/2014_03_02_archive.html

Sorry I don’t have any personal works to share lately!



Josh

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