CGSociety :: Tutorial
23 October 2008, by Nicholas Miles
To celebrate the opening of the EXPOSÉ 7 Call for Entries, we join EXPOSÉ 6 Master Artist Nick Miles in the tutorial of his Mantis Queen, part of his Insect Dynasty series. Nick's work has featured in EXPOSE 4, EXPOSE 6and EXOTIQUE 4.
Over the previous few months, Nick Miles had been experimenting with abstract patterns in his paintings with the aim of opening new creative avenues. The Mantis Queen was a major step for him in that development process. We join him now to describe his journey.
Concept
Searching for inspiration I decided the Praying Mantis would be an ideal subject as their exotic forms would work well with the pattern work I wished to apply. I knew I wanted the character to be imposing, someone who would study the viewer as much as the viewer studied them. This very quickly gave me an idea of the type of composition I wanted; I knew the viewer needed to be looking up at the character, enhancing the air of superiority for the character.
Sometimes I have a very clear color scheme in mind for a piece but this time I chose to start in greyscale, allowing me to focus on composition and form. A lack of color scheme from the outset isn’t really a problem because as the piece began to solidify a color scheme would present itself to me.
Brushes
I have numerous shape brushes ranging from paint strokes to patterns based around tribal designs. Once I have my design I’ll change the shape dynamics along with other settings such as scattering until I have a brush which I feel creates an interesting mark that I can use. It’s all about tweaking until you get the look you’re searching for. It takes a bit of time, but it’s well worth the investment. It’s not enough to have a huge list of brushes and not know how best to apply each of them. It’s a constant leaning process. I am forever adding to and deleting from my brush set.
Once I selected the brushes I thought were suitable for this piece I used them to cover my canvas and get away from the dreaded blank page! Working on a new layer I started to pick out shapes I see within the paint strokes using a palette brush. At this stage I’ll use a palette brush to keep myself as loose as possible and keep the workflow quick and expressive. If I go in with detail brushes, the danger is that I’ll start to noodle certain features too quickly and so lock an idea down before it’s fully developed.
Because I wanted this character to appear quite regal a basic colour palette of reds and creams began to emerge in my mind, so I applied a color wash on a new color layer. Once I’m happy with this I flatten it down onto the main body of the character. I like to keep my layers as simple as possible and at this point I’m happy to have one layer for the background and another for the character.
