Chester Ocampo takes us through the 2D process of creating
"The Gods of Harvest" for EXOTIQUE 4.

CGSociety :: Tutorial
By Chester Ocampo, 23 January 2009

Hello everyone! I’m here to walk you through the creative process of my illustration “The Gods of Harvest”. I created it specifically to submit to EXOTIQUE 4, though I had no idea it would be selected. My 'Gods of Harvest' image is featured on page 144-145 of . I suppose if you believe in a concept strongly enough, you can make something worthy of your talent. is calling for entries right now and I encourage everyone to get involved.

I initially created the artwork without any idea that I’d be showing the process, but the following story will give you an idea of how it all came together for me. The illustration was created using Adobe Photoshop CS2 with a Wacom Intuos 3, from start to finish. It took a couple of weeks, during my free, after-work time. I hope some of you may find it informative. Okay, here we go…

I set the sketch layer at 30 percent opacity and proceeded to digitally ink each character on a separate layer. The digitally inked layers were grouped together for easy monitoring. I kept the ink lines loose since they would all be painted over along the way.

Using a combination of Brush, Eraser, Magic Wand, Lasso tool, and the Fill, I create a new layer beneath the line art layer group, filled with a flat color to separate the characters from the background.

On the Background layer, I used Gradients and some Airbrushing to assign the kind of lighting and color I wanted.

Sketching
I created an A4-size canvas in Photoshop, at 400dpi. Normally, I would draw one or two thumbnails first before proceeding with a neater, tighter sketch, but I had a pretty clear idea for an image that had been brewing in my head a few weeks before I started the actual drawing. This put me in the fortunate position of going straight to a tight sketch and I could skip the thumbnails altogether. I started small, with the sketch roughly 25 percent of the size of the canvas. Each character was sketched in separate layers for easy layout adjustments. Once the composition had been finalized, all the layers, except the background layer, were merged and eventually resized to fill up the canvas.

I further subdivided the flat character's layer into a series of individual flat layers corresponding to each character. Separating the flats this way helped me deal with each character individually later on, without messing up the other characters. These separate character layers were then grouped together and placed beneath the line art layer group.

Although not shown here, I blocked out the lighting of each character using a big, round, solid brush, in varying opacities. Tackling each character individually, I started refining shadows and highlights, and defined each element’s diffuse color, skin tones, hair and armor, using a custom, semi-soft brush with a bit of noise for added texture.

Painting
Once all of the characters were roughly rendered, I added some depth and separation, to accentuate their distance from each other.

At this point, I merged each character’s line layer with their corresponding rough paint layer, and compiled it all in one layer group.

I saved the file under a new file name and proceeded to work on the original file. I had two reasons for doing this. One, to keep the file size from getting bloated and thus slow down Photoshop’s performance; and two, so that I can always go back to a specific point of the image, in case it strays from where I want it to go.

Texturing
I polished the render on each character by blending all the rough spots using smaller brush sizes and sometimes airbrushing in varying opacities. The line art has been painted over and only appears in selected areas. Light bouncing off from one character to another was added for a more cohesive image. From a technical standpoint, bounce light unified the image through the spill-over of colors from one element to another, effectively blending certain colors and achieving harmony. From a context standpoint, bounce light unified the image as it hints at the spatial relation between elements.

The completed polished renders on all characters were then flattened into a single layer. This gave me fewer opportunities to nitpick each character rendering and helped keep the file size down.