Digital Artist Aomori Explains How She Created ‘Dancing With The Wind’

Posted on 28. Jul, 2010 by DAS Team in Articles, Figure, Tutorials

Hello Digital Art Secrets readers! My name is Monika, also known as ‘Aomori‘ and this is the nickname that you will eventually recognize me and my paintings on the Web by.

I’d like to share with you some tips on how to create a digital painting using Photoshop and a graphic tablet (I’m aware that the same effect may be gained with a mouse, but it’s way more difficult). To gain good results it’s good practice to divide the process of drawing into two basic steps. First, you shall think about what are the components that will be included in the drawing (choosing color palette, pose, search for some references). The second part is about how you are going to achieve what you want to do.

PART I: IDEA – BASIC SKETCH

Sometimes when you don’t know what you would like to draw, you start to scribble and you might start to realize that you are gaining some interesting effects, but it’s only sometimes. More often you’ll create a chaotic artwork. Eventually after a lot of scribbling, you’ll notice what might be good to concentrate on and you’ll have to redraw the rest.
So for your own sake you should draw quick sketches of the idea you have in your mind.
As an example, I’ll use my recent painting of a centaurette. I did this art as a commission so I had some guidelines I should follow. I imagined a dancing centaurette, with her hands up and her hair a mess, all in blues and whites – with some flowers around. I imagined her horse body in a pose with at least two legs above the ground – it should create a dynamic effect of dancing movement.
With this image in my mind, I searched for photographs with poses similar to those I’ve imagined. It took me some time but in the end I was really happy about my searching – I also checked how other artist imagine centaurs. Photos and other paintings are always a great source of inspiration (but inspiration does not mean to rip off someone’s idea, there is a huge difference…)
The sketch I have created at my first attempt looked like that:

After some consultations, there appeared some things that needed to be changed. Length of hair, placement of hands and colours. Also there is a little hint that in the background, I’ll draw some splashing water:

PART II: DETAILS – FINISHING THE ARTWORK

1. Size of the canvas
When you’re happy with your sketch, next step would be to enlarge it. Personally I like to work on canvas that has 3000 px on the longest side. It’s a good size to add some nice details, but also you don’t want to work on a single image for too long.
2. Organize it!
With larger canvas, it may be a good idea to block some layers with Basic colours: some pink for skin etc. I can suggest two ways of working:
1st If you like to draw with lineart: First thing after enlarging the sketch, you should start drawing clean lineart with a small solid brush. After that you will create layers for some parts of the drawing; in my example those might be: skin, hair, tail, clothes, horse body, flowers, background etc…
2nd The Method I have used here: I feel more freedom when drawing without lineart. It’s easier to apply various changes without fighting with too many layers. I’ve blocked for myself a clean layer called ‘body’ where it basically had everything, from hooves,to tips of the fingers. The ‘clothes’ layer was above and ‘background’ layer  was the least below. It’s more professional to draw with that method ;3

Part III: Silhouette of the pose

After blocking layers with the basic colors (or after drawing lineart and filling it with color), you should make sure that the pose you’ve drawn looks good. There is a very easy way to do it. Save your file, so that you don’t lost your work, and then merge all layers of the character to one – it will be just temporary, so remember to not save your file in this way. With all character on one layer, change the color of it – best thing is to choose the black color. You’ll create a nice silhouette of the pose you’ve drawn and the black color will help to make it stand out.
Now, look carefully at your drawing again (maybe do a mirror image of it to gain fresh look) and honestly say to yourself if the pose looks good. In my case, it was important that the pose would look soft and harmonic.

When you notice any flaws, feel free to fix them – it’s better to do it now than later. Come back to the point where you saved your image with all layers separated.

PART IIII: It’s all about details now

If you’re not very experienced in digital painting, it might be helpful for you to use THE eyedropper tool to sample colors from your reference photo. The photo I have been using was darker than my paintinng, so I started adjusting the color. I changed the balance of highlights and contrast, It’s easy to do in Photoshop.
At this point, it’s really all about how much patience and skills you have. I worked on my painting for about 10 -15 hours (I was taking breaks so I lost my count somewhere In the middle of the process). I know that there are always something more to do, but at some point you have to say stop. I was pleased with the outcome and simply didn’t want to spend more time on it.
It would be difficult to describe how to paint each part of this drawing without any screen shots, so now I can only show you the finished result of my work:

and some details in bigger size:

If there will be another chance, I’ll try to explain another tutorial with more details and screen shots.
I really hope you’ll find something useful in this article, thank you for reading!

My references used for this artwork: [Link1] & [Link2]

For more information, visit:

http://aomori.deviantart.com/

Tags: aomori, dancing with the wind, lineart, monika, sketch