PROCESS VIDEO // mushrooms - part 2 (Patreon)

Facts about this video: 

• The video is sped up 200% - that’s twice as fast as the original speed.
• I have split it into three parts in total. This is the second of three!
• Here's the links to all the parts: PART 1 // PART 2 // PART 3
• The entire piece took me about 6 hours to paint, which was split up into shorter painting sessions.
• Wes Gardner’s gritty butter brush was crucial in allowing me to render this one. It has a nice texture to it that I think contributed to the organic feel! You can find it here: http://cbr.sh/kfv7sa?ref=loish
  

MY PROCESS

This part is a lot about rendering it and elevating the detail so it feels more like a painting than a sketch. For this piece, it helped a lot to bring some depth to the shadows and colors by introducing desaturated color. I start doing this around 6:30 minutes in, where I take a desaturated tone and paint over some of the mushrooms so that they become more faded. This moves them to the background and makes the image appear as if there is more depth there. I think desaturated shadows are a great way to offset warmer tones and bring some balance to the painting!

Another moment I do this is 27:14 minutes in, where I literally paint a greyish tone over the middle mushroom.

I also love adding color to the edges of different elements. You can see me doing this at 14:33 minutes, where I add an orange line to the edge of the elf’s legs. This is a stylization approach that adds a lot of appeal to the painting even though it makes very little technical sense!

After that, it’s a question of adding detail and rendering in a way that preserves the painterly and storybook-ish feel of this painting! I want the details to feel immersive but not too fine or hyper-realistic. So you can see me playing around with different ways to paint the spots on the mushrooms that are consistent with the style I’m going for.

Part 3 is coming up!