PROCESS VIDEO // abundance, part 1 (Patreon)

Here’s the process video for the Abundance painting I made last year! This is how the painting turned out:

I thought this was a good one to show you guys since it shows my process for creating a character-based digital painting and how I go about finalizing and rendering my artwork to create a finished look. The full process took about 5 hours, so I sped the process up 1.5 times and split it into three parts.

The initial part of my process for paintings like these is always to search for an expressive pose. I just need it to ‘click’ for me. I do a mix of poses from the imagination and loosely referencing them from stock pictures. Once I find a pose that I like, I arrange the other details around it, so getting the right pose is super important to most of the creative decisions that I make later on. This is why I try out some random sketches first, experimenting with different shapes and movements until I like what I have created - and that happens around 8 minutes in. The final pose I chose was based on this image by AdorkaStock, which I referenced more closely at first and then changed and modified as I continued in the process. After that, I focus on making the hair, clothing, and decorative elements work well with this initial pose.

This painting was inspired by a sketch session I did where I used really bright, warm colors and rounded shapes:

So as soon as I start adding color, I open up that sketch on the same screen to keep as reference and pick colors from. I use pretty much the same workflow that I did for those sketches as well: bright base colors and a simple shadow layer on top. After that, it’s time to gradually refine the detail and paint!

Part 2 is coming right up!