It Started with a Sketch

Often I’m asked, “What medium do you use?”
While I used to use watercolor and colored pencil as my medium… I started painting digitally about four years ago. I try to make my digital work have the same organic feel of traditional mediums.

It starts with a pencil drawing, sometimes very sketchy, that I take into Photoshop and clean up a bit. Often I paint over or eliminate the lines altogether, but If I’m going to leave the line work, I’ll ink them first and clean them up digitally.
After I’ve separated the layers, I usually always work over a layer that had been under painted with a darker color. This gives the illustration a luminous quality and helps define the natural contours and highlights. Here, I want them on a white background so that I can paste them into a another illustration later.

Next I paint in the details on a separate layer with a brush that has a texture added to it. This allows some of the under painting to show through and gives the illustration a pastel feel. I always turn the opacity and flow down to about 40. Then I go back and add more details and highlights on another layer.  Clean it up and it’s done. This is a very brief explanation I know, but I’ve learned and continue to learn by playing with my medium and making mistakes….. only now I get to push undo!                                                  Ctrl+Alt+Z… Ctrl+Alt+Z…Ctrl+Alt+Z

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