slowgolde

This is a character concept piece that I’ve been working on and off in my spare time for around five weeks now. Having been quite intensively involved in a number of realistic/scientific projects recently, it was great to switch off and get back to what I love doing, painting characters!

All together it took about 15 hours, painted entirely in Photoshop CS2. Primarily it’s using the default brushes, but I also made some custom skin brushes for pores, wrinkles and any repetitive skin features. I’ve posted a few work in progress images below so you can see how it progressed. I actually saved my canvas every hour or so, so I will try to make an animated gif of the process- but that’ll be another update.

This was the initial stage after about 30 minutes, just getting a feel for how I wanted the strange creature to look- in the case of the wanderer, almost entirely humanoid with a twist on a couple of features.

Just tightening up his features at this stage, I decide early on that I want the eyes to be the focus.

At this stage I block in the background and tighten up some details. I notice some issues with the hair and bone structure that need to be addressed.

Getting pretty close to the end product. I add an ear and repaint the hair to fit his skull a little tighter. From this point onwards it was really just tightening details up and trying not to overdo areas that didn’t really need it. I toyed with the idea of blue eyes, but it seemed to kill any empathy with the character.

You can find a higher resolution version here.

Thanks, any comments appreciated.