Emerald Conundrum - The Walkthrough


          For this painting I had a clear idea of the concept to be portrayed - a guy wearing nothing but jewellery that wouldn't look gay. No weapons were allowed in the scene. I had a blank card on how to go about portraying that, so I decided that it would be a naga to avoid potential hassle with lower body decorations that might arise should I opt for drawing a human.

          <boring technical talk> The tools used are Corel Painter 9, Wacom Intuos. Brush used is Wet Detail Brush from Acrylics, with resat at 100% all the time, opacity around 25-100, depending on what I'm painting, Subcategory in Brush Creator occasionally changed (which I usually mention in the text), and under "Size" category in Brush Creator the shape of the tip changed to the 2nd from top and first from the left. Blenders used are Grainy Water and Just Add Water with opacity changed around as necessary. The final image is 3900x5700 pixels large and took 3 days to complete.</boring technical talk>

          I had decided that I was going to have a dim background and strong lighting on the character himself with some of that light spilling onto the ground nearby to give him better grounding in the scene (and 'cause I think it looks nifty).

          I made a few sketches and color tests until I happened across one that I liked (img 1) - a bleak nightly scene with some crumbling columns in the background. It would provide decent framing without being too stiff or obtrusive. I refined the clouds a little until I felt there was a good enough S-shaped pattern going on there (img 1a).








Next, I added in a sketch of the naga boy himself (img 2). I decided to keep his face in the shadow in order to make him look more ominous and let his white hair stand out. The snake part would be dark and slightly shimmery (originally inspired by Morelia Boeleni, but at some point I realised I wasn't feeling suicidal enough to draw out all that scaling and irridescence for this pic).

          Then I opened a dozen references of unsuspecting male models next to the image and started working my way through the upper body anatomy, going from rough values (img 3a) to a more refined and detailed appearance (img 3b), using the acrylics brush for the drawing, Grainy Water blender and Just Add Water blender for blending. (The former for stronger strokes and the latter for softer blending.)


          His right arm wasn't quite working, so I changed its position slightly (img 4). Also started on the face. I wanted it to be largely in the shadow, but with enough ambient lighting to shape the general features. Worked on the hands a bit, using photos of my own hands under similar lighting as loose reference.







Worked on the face a little more and sketched in the jewellery (img 5). Some bits will get changed later on, but as a rough sketch it's close enough.

          I drew the adornments in a relatively simple manner. First the general shape with a few lines using a dark color, then erasing the edges of those lines a little and going over them with wiggly strokes using a smaller, harder brush to give an impression of rough texture (img 6a). Then I picked a color slightly lighter and warmer than the current lightest highlights on the figure and using the same hard brush squiggled in some highlights (img 6b). Afterwards, strategically added little emeralds. I wanted them to appear fairly subtle, so I used the green sparingly. For contrast, the figure's eyes got bright purple irises, somewhere between the pinks in the background and the blues on the figure in terms of hue.


          I switched out the "claws" by his shoulders with chains, attached below his collarbones with ornamental piercings with little emeralds (img 7). That way they still qualify as jewellery, but appear "hard-core" enough to add extra manliness points. At this point I felt he was looking a little plain and added a set of horns. They made him more visually interesting and provided more excuse to have his face in the shadow and more room for well-justified jewellery. I also got rid of the crossed thingies below his waist 'cause they were looking a bit awkward, and added shadow on his chest roughly where it would be cast by the horns.






Refined the horns (img 8), changed their jewellery slightly, refined the shading cast by them on his face and added a few more lines of jewellery on his hair to make it all look more interesting. Then painted the bracelet on his upper arm while refining this and that around the torso sporadically.

          At this point it was becoming exceedingly obvious that something was terribly wrong with the proportions here (img 9a). All the changes to his arms, face, head in general had made the torso look smaller than it should be. After confirming a few times with the suggested proportions by Andrew Loomis, I put each arm on a separate layer, put the torso on a separate layer as well, moved the arms and scaled the torso a bit larger (img 9b). Since that affected the composition, I then selected the entire naga and moved him around the canvas a bit, too. Ideally I'd still have the figure on a separate layer here, but since Painter is known to be special and likes to corrupt saves now and then, I had to restore some of it from a .bmp save so everything was on one layer by now.

So I shaked a stick in Painter's general direction again for a good measure, and proceeded to refine the background a little more. In some spots I changed the brush to Grainy Flat Cover to add a little extra texture. Added some crumbling rocks magically floating away from the column on the left and added vague moon-like shapes in the upper right.







It's all still a catastrophic mess when viewed real up close (img 10), but since the image is large, it will all look a whole lot more detailed when scaled down for online view. Same applies to prints as they are usually viewed from some distance, and it will be printed at several hundred dots per inch.

          With the background and proportions more or less in check, I moved on to the snake part. First I blended the base a bit more using Grainy Water blender and Just Add Water blender (just enough to leave a slightly grainy texture) and then faced the horrible fact that I'd need to draw the scales and didn't have the time to go all detailed on them (nor would it fit in without refining the rest of the image considerably more anyways, so that's more time needed right there).




So what I did was make a new layer, set the Wet Detail Brush from Acrylics to "Grainy Flat Cover", picked a color that looked like a good color to pick and made several rows of little dabs on the tail where scales would go (img 11). I made sure to roughly place them in a pattern near the middle of the tail, but it wasn't quite as essential to observe by the edges where they wouldn't be as noticeable, so I was less careful there. At some point I realised that the light blue wasn't entirely visible lower down, so I picked a lighter color to draw a few more lines in order to see what I was doing. The actual color didn't matter at all at this point because of what I was going to do later on.




When I had had quite enough with the scales, I duplicated the layer with the scale dabs and placed it below the first one. Then I did it twice more, this time flipping them horizontally to go better with the shape of the tail. This obviously wasn't going to work where it curved away a whole lot, so I just added more dots in that area manually (img 12). The pattern didn't matter quite as much there since it was viewed at an angle anyways, plus that part was less important. I also went back and added extra dots around the very edge of the tail everywhere to make it look a whole lot more scaled and slightly uneven.

          Now I wasn't going to have a striped naga with glow-in-the-dark scales, so I merged all the layers with scale dabs in one, checked "Preserve Transparency" in the layer menu, set the Tolerance on the paint bucket tool to 255 and filled the layer with pale blue color to get rid of the stripes. Then I picked a large brush and colored the scales as a whole as I wanted them, according to the general color and lighting (img 13a). Then I unchecked "Preserve Transparency" and went over some of the scales with a smaller brush and added some extra highlights near the top of the tail and the curved part to make them look a bit more shimmery and scale-like (img 13b).






Afterwards I drew the other bracelet and the jewellery over the tail in a similar fashion as the rest (img 14). On the tail, I made the shadows cast by the jewellery uneven, according to how the scale pattern went, with longer shadows in the parts between the scales. This helped to enforce the feeling of an uneven surface.

          Then, I decided to refine the ground a little bit (img 15). It was done using the same Wet Detail Brush set to Grainy Flat Cover and Grainy Water blender going over the area with circular strokes, blending and erasing here and there as necessary (I tend to make a new layer or two for these things in case something needs to be erased or I mess up). It's very rough up close, but when zoomed out it looks like rough ground with slight fog, which is exactly what I was after.






Afterwards, it was finally time to draw the orbs he was holding. I wanted them to refract light in a similar fashion as the orbs used in contact juggling, so after some quality time with Google image search, I concluded that those things tend to reflect things rotated about 180 degrees from how they are, with some distortion and foggyness. To achieve the effect, I first drew a circle in the shape the ball was going to be using the Pen tool and made a duplicate for the other (wanted them to be of the same size) (img 16).




Then I selected the first ball again (let's call it The Big Yellow Orb for convenience), kept it where it was, and increased its size using Scale to 400%. In layer menu rightclicked on its layer and picked "Select Transparency" (img 17a).



Then I switched to the canvas layer (where everything except for the orbs was at, no thanks to corrupted saves and restoring from bmp format), picked the selection tool, rightclicked, and picked "Layer by Copy" (img 17b).



So I now had a ball 4x as big as the original with a copy of everything in that area. I deleted The Big Yellow Orb, and scaled the round layer with the image on it down to 25%. So now I had a round layer in the size of the original orb with an image on it (img 17c).




I rotated it 180%, checked "Preserve Transparency" again and played around with the Bulge tool from Distortion menu and Just Add Water blender until I had something that looked about right (img 18). Then I repeated the whole process for the other orb. Somehow it all sounds way more complicated than it was.




With that done, I added a faint glow around the rim of the orbs and some reflections on their surface where the light would be hitting them (img 19). Afterwards, stuck in some smoke falling down from in between the naga boy's fingers. The smoke isn't particularly fancy, it's drawn by making a new layer, setting it to lighten, drawing a few lines where it'll go, then making Another layer, setting that to lighten and blending it up a bit. Afterwards some erasing and transparency adjustments. Not perfectly perfect, but recognisably smoky.

          At this point all the components were essentially in place, but it all looked a bit bland (img 20a), so this is where the magical final touchups ensue. I picked a light green color and went over the most brightly lit areas, adding another level of highlights. Made a new layer set to "Overlay" and went over some bits of the tail with a pale greenish blue color to add a faint glow (img 20b).






Then merged all the layers with the canvas and adjusted the levels until the contrast looked about right. Then set the Wet Details Brush from Acrylics to Grainy Soft cover and added some barely visible strands of smoke or fog at the bottom to add a sense of something being there without cluttering that area. Refined some bits in the background a little. Then created a new layer and with the brush set to Grainy Flat cover and a very large size made a single round dab over the naga's head. Then used the eraser set to large size to erase most of it until a faint halo was left, and ran it through the Soften filter to make the edges softer. Signed it, closed it and called it done.

You can see the finished version over here. Don't be shy, leave a comment, maybe hit the fav button or support the artist by ordering a print.

All images and text on this page (c) Liiga Smilshkalne. This walkthrough is provided for learning purposes and may not be redistributed in any shape or form, partially or whole without the express written permission of the author. You are welcome to link to it. Be nice or the gremlins will get you.