This illustration was done for Paizo Publishing's Dragon magazine. The Art Director, Sean Glenn has always given me a lot of freedom with my ideas, and gives the kind of feedback that only enhances the painting and the process. The initial direction given was for a group of heroes to be in the middle of a dungeon, about to be swarmed by a horde of goblins. The attention should be primarily on the heroes, and then the goblins.
I started out with some simple sketches to show the movement of the piece and the placement of the initial elements. Fairly standard.
At this point, I am ready to start the finished physical drawing. I probably over do this, drawing in as much detail as I can. I like to work on smooth Bristol board and I use lead holder pencils with lead ranging from 4H for lay-in and then H to 4B to create the detail and establish line weights. I use line weights to play with the drawing's depth.
I don't show a lot of value information in these initial sketches. I get better results when I address this in the blocking-in stage on the computer. I draw a lot of inspiration from many different artists, but four that stand out are Bouguereau, Leighton, Alma-Tadema and Gerome. In fact for this painting I was inspired by a masterpiece from William Bouguereau, titled The Flagellation of Christ.
The movement in this painting has always inspired me. You can follow the movement through the limbs of those with the flails. Each element leads to the next, always flowing, always pushing you to the next point. Brilliant.
After scanning my drawing, I start on the blocking in. I will end up doing 99 percent of my painting in Painter, but I often start in Photoshop while setting up my layers and getting the colors right. Photoshop handles this stage better for me. I find that Photoshop is better for manipulation and Painter for creation. I usually create a layer for the foreground, in this case the foremost goblins, then the characters, and the background. For this painting I also created a separate layer for the large column. This makes it easy to paint quickly without destroying edges I want to preserve. At this point I make adjustments to color and value. I generally try to pick tones for the painting that are a little darker than the middle value of the color I was aiming for. One of the great things about working digitally is the ability to try out everything. I always take time to try as many different color combinations as possible. I think you can learn an incredible amount from this. It just wouldn't be feasible to do the same exploration in oils. Once I start painting I will hit the darks first and then head to the lightest values.
