Digital Painting Process and Practice

It's been a while since I last had the opportunity to post my progress with you, as you can imagine work with the New Year has been absolutely mental. 

Never the less I have managed to get around to producing some digital paintings (this time around) during my free time. This is part of an effort to upgrade my existing skills and get to learn some cool new processes for digital painting inside photo shop. 

The general process was to produce an outline of a character, then to give the character a tonal range (orange colour) which we would then adapt into the kind of finish we wanted and add some lighting to. 

My first attempt I decided to pick a sculpture, so I could compare my 'value layer' [or tonal ranges] to the initial photo graph: as close to classic copy sketching as you can get on a digital tablet. 

I learnt that it would probably more beneficial to keep your brush block-like for an artistic and stylised effect, whereas the addition of an air brush sort of smokes the image out.  

Fig.1 silhouette starting point

Fig.2 Value layer (tonal range)

Fig.3 Added bounce light and shadow

My next attempt, I tackled an environment with exactly the same process. I feel this was much more successful partially because by this point  I was getting more used to the handling of my graphics tablet again but also because there is a continuity with the brush strokes and style of the image.
For these exercises I used a chalk brush at 20-50% opacities as well as a smudge brush.

Fig.4 Environment Concept

GOW_LAV Concept Final Render

The Hardcore modelling challenge has been a busy few weeks which have pushed me to get something out of 3DS Max as quickly and efficiently as possible. I'm glad to be approaching my final few renders now, with the debate once composited weather I should try to attempt to create a shock wave effect from the main turret by exploring particle systems or possible environment Fog.

It was also nice to move into Photoshop after so much time and effort spent in 3DS Max, to switch things up with a bit of compositing this afternoon.

 Here is how it's looking so far, I'll have a high quality render with a few changes tomorrow.  

Fig.1 Final Composite 01

After a few tweaks, plus rendering out various passes for the tank I have come to my final render for the Hardcore modelling challenge (see below). 

Fig.2 The Final Render

Fig.3 The Final Render 1600x1200px

(format required for the competition).

Fig.4 :Front Orthographic

Fig.5: Side Orthographic

Fig.6: Aerial Orthographic

Fig.7 Wireframe (1600x1200px)

Fig.8: Wireframe (1920x1080 px)