I started off by looking for a suitable image of Eddie Van Halen. I needed to have him in a classic pose; one I can ‘play’ with, and to accentuate the great wild fun he seems to have on stage. That was an easy task. There are a lot of great shots of Van Halen on the web but for reference, I cannot go past the great David Plastik. Have a look at his site in related links for this article.
I started first with the background: 26 x 34cm @ 300dpi. I paint bucketed the black plain color and a purple blurred matte. For brushes, I chose an Oil Brush – Detail Oils Brush 15 variant, with an opacity variation between 20 and 40). I started painting with a large size (around 200) brush to provide a good mix between the purple and red and the background dark. To ensure a smoother finish, I used the soften effect - effect/focus/soften - I think the value was around 70/80 which I then applied three times. Maybe even more to get the color transitions smoother.
For the lighting effect besides Eddie´s head, I used the same method using only the white color in a separate layer, changing its opacity to 22%.
Here I just painted plain colors to define the main areas, on a separate layer. The brush used was ‘Oil’ / Detail Oils Brush variant , 100 opacity - and next (below) I defined the bodies ( Eddie and Guitar´s body) using the same brush but 20-30 opacity and the dark color variations.
Most of the entire process I used from checking out Linda Bergkvist´s Hair Tutorial. This is a tremendous lesson to follow and it really works.
I began the hair in a separate layer and in this case I had to change the brush types to simulate the same results. For brushes I used again my preferred Oil Brush with opacity between 30-40 and light skin tones. I think the Medium Bristle Oils can produce nice textures also.
I started with the non-scanned drawing layer non-visible.
Here the process was blocking the hair.
The next images show how I improved the blocks using low sizes (around 60-70) and low opacity brush( 20-30).
I chose the area that I´d like to improve the details and maintain the main focus. Then I began to define the hair blocks. In Corel Painter I created a layers group called Hair.
There I can create as many layers as I needed for each step of the process.
For each different stage of the hair detailing I used a small sized brush and a higher level of Opacity (always using the same Oils Brush): for the samples above the opacity was around 30-40 (Hair Figure 1) and 50-60 (Hair Figure 2) but smaller size. For greater detailing I used smaller brush sizes.
For each new step I created a new layer (inside the group).
After creating new lines of dark hair color, I smoothed each one a little using the Blender brush with a Blur Variant at 50% opacity of around 20 size), following the hair direction.
Texture, texture and texture (wow Linda, what a job!)
For the high detailing I used a very small brush size of #02 -#03 and opacity between 50-70%. In the shiny parts, I used a lighter hair color and a small brush size and between 20-30% layer opacity – always using the Alt/Option to pick up the color. After each group of lines I smoothed them further by using the Blander brush at size 20.
After many textures, lines and blurred lines I flattened the group layers.
