The Fallen Angel by Del Melchionda

Hello Digital Art Secrets readers, my name is Del Melchionda. I work primarily as a 3D artist, specializing in shaders, lighting, and texturing. My work painting texture maps for 3D models has led to my interest in digital painting in general. Photoshop CS2 is the paint program I use for most everything, along with my Wacom Intuos.  I love working out lighting and depicting human anatomy, both of which are seen below in my painting, “transmute”.  Here are some WIPS and the process I went through…

1) I painted this first as a greyscale image, and then added color over that. The advantage of working this way is that you can be sure all your values are correct before you start adding color detail. The disadvantage is that it takes a bit longer to complete, because in a way you’re painting the same thing twice. I find the grayscale method tends to give images a soft, ethereal quality, whereas painting with color straight away gives things more saturated, vibrant tones. I use both methods equally, depending on how certain I am of the color choices I’m making. Painting everything first in greyscale give you greater leeway to try different color combinations without committing yourself right away.

So to start the greyscale value portion, I began roughing in a mid-range grey background on one layer. In most cases you don’t want to use pure white or pure black for a background. On another layer, I began blocking in large flat areas of pure value that make up the figure, working from darkest and building up to lightest. No need to worry about blending or detail at this stage, my main concern was to make sure values were correct.

2) Once the basic values were blocked in, I began to pretty things up. Working with a hard round brush with low opacity settings, I blended between areas of light and dark to smooth transitions, building things up slowly by controlling the opacity of the shades of black and white. I use a hard round brush for probably 90% of everything I paint. I also have a broken up scattery brush I use in conjunction with the Smudge tool to blend difficult areas and it works amazingly well. The smudge tool, when used correctly, is very useful!  Just be sure to use the right brush and keep tight control over the strength – for delicate blending like this I keep it down around 10% or less.

I also started to think a little bit more about the background, especially what he was sitting on. I wanted a timeless feel, so I didn’t want to date it with a particular type of chair. A simple stone block seemed a good solution, so I started working out the look of that.

3) The figure’s values are set. I began work on the background layer, making the back wall more dramatic, defining its edge, adding some detail to the walls, floor, and stone. Now I began to play around with the color palette. On another layer over the greyscale, with the mode set to Color, I experimented. With a Color layer you can see all your grayscale work underneath, it’s just tinted by the colors in the Color layer.

4) I added textural detail to the wall and floor and decided to go with a warm orange for figure, a greenish blue for background. So on my Color layer, I set up three flat areas of colors – the green of the background, the flesh color of the figure, and the blond of the hair. On top of this layer I added another layer, this time set to Normal mode, and began painting for real, in color over my values. This was my main working layer. When I start out color painting I pull color from a figure painting swatch set I like to use, gradations of orange, yellow, red, and grey. As the painting progresses I abandon the swatch set and color pick from areas of the painting itself, using these new colors I’ve created through the process of slowly building up color with the low opacity brush.

5) Colors are coming along. I started adding greenish blue tones to the shadow areas of the figure, pale golds and pinks to the lighter. At this stage I started to think a little more about what I wanted the message of this painting to be. Normally this would be something one should work out in the early stages, but with this one, when I started out, all I had in mind was a figure study. But as it progressed, he started to look more and more like an angel to me, a pensive one, to be sure. Perhaps a fallen angel? I roughed in some loose and falling feathers, which I liked, and some hacked off wings on his back, which I didn’t, yuck.

6) Still thinking about how to depict the wings of a fallen angel. I wanted to do something that wasn’t cliched and tired, but nothing came to mind. I tried roughing in scraggly wings losing their feathers but wasn’t crazy about that idea. In the meantime I continued to work on adding color. I increased areas of contrast on the figure and background, adding more saturated colors to parts of the body, in particular the band between light and shadow. I added reddish tones to areas like knees, elbows and knuckles, pinks on fingers and toes, warm orange where skin is close to skin and reflects on itself like the arm near the body and leg, more warm orange where the skin is thin and light is softly diffused, like nostrils and ears.

7) Finally, I have an idea for the wings. Bones. The idea is that the fallen angel is losing his feathers, and they are falling off the framework of bones that supported his wings, making them visible. Some people have also interpreted this image to have an Icarus-type story behind it, and I can see that. I looked for references on bird wing anatomy and researched how the feathers inserted into the wings, and actually found some images of dead birds that showed what I was trying to portray. I started the bone framework on a new layer, and the feather layer over that, trying to make the feathers more and more ragged as they went up.

8 ) At this stage it’s all about details. Digitally painted figures tend to have a smooth, airbrushed look to the skin, so I like to add things like texture and body hair to make it more realistic. I use the texture patterns with Photoshop brushes for most of this. I’ve also made a custom body hair brush I use on areas like arms and legs. For the feathers and head hair I wanted a soft, glowing look so I paint them in a few layers, some Color Dodge, some Linear Dodge for a soft, glowing look. For these I use various hair brushes, generally a grouping of dots that resemble hair when stroked.

The final layers are flattened, last bit of color correction is done, and now the image is finished. Hope you guys have enjoyed this walkthrough!

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