Marta Dahlig walks us through the creation of her
Excellence Award winning 'Judith' from EXPOSÉ 7.

CGSociety :: Tutorial
18 August 2009, by Marta Dahlig

Be sure to download Marta's video at the end of the feature tutorial. It's 320Mb of video recorded when she was creating the piece.

I've always found 'Judith' to be one of the most fascinating characters. There are very few strong women lauded in ancient history and she is definitely one to remember. Here’s a shortened version of her story:

In the second century B.C., as the powerful Assyrian army invades the Near East, the town of Bethulia is besieged by the cruel and domineering Holofernes, foremost general of the Assyrian emperor Nebuchadnezzar. If Bethulia yields, the whole country will fall into Assyrian hands. Discouraged, the city’s elders agree to surrender the famine-stricken city if they are not rescued within a few days. Judith, a young widow and most unlikely savior, challenges them to take responsibility for the future of their community. She enters the Assyrian camp where Holofernes, smitten with her remarkable beauty, invites her to a banquet. When he retires to his bed in a drunken stupor, they are left alone in his tent. Judith takes up his sword and chops his head off. With the Assyrian army thrown into confusion, Judith inspires the Israelites to launch a surprise attack from which they emerge victorious.

Reference was drawn from many places. Gustav Klimt for one.

My first attempt to depict this character took place around four years ago and I never managed to finish the work. During the following years, I kept coming back to the theme and right now I cannot even count the number of times I battled with the subject. The image you see I started somewhere in December 2008 and it took me a very long time to finish. Being silent for the past eighteen months, I thought it would be a cool thing to come back with something special. I therefore decided to document the whole painting process.

My whole working process, starting from the very first sketch, is rather simple. I apply colors at a very low opacity, gradually putting more and more layers of color on top of each other. This lets me control and model the whole outlook from the very beginning but it does not exactly look too attractive at first.

I usually start from painting the character, but in this case, since I planned a lot of details for the background, the first thing I started working on is the surroundings – simulating objects even with a few messy strokes will make it easier for me to merge the character with the background later on.

Theme Interpretation
There were many depictions of Judith throughout art history but one that I found especially fascinating is Klimt’s take on the theme, as it is much more sensual and erotic than you might expect to be a depiction of a historically glorified character. I wanted to get the same mood across, and that is why my interpretation is rather loose. I concentrated more on achieving a certain atmosphere rather than on composing a historically accurate story.

Starting out
My whole working process is rather simple. I apply colors on a very low opacity, gradually putting more and more layers of color on top. This lets me control and model the whole outlook from the very beginning. Since I have planned a lot of details for the background, the first thing I started working on are the surroundings, simulating objects even with a few messy strokes will make it easier for me to merge the character with the background later on.

Brushes and layers
To paint this piece, I used a regular airbrush and an alteration of the default hard round brush with slightly ragged, blurry edges. Custom brushes are great and I use them excessively, as they let me easily texture bigger, uniform surfaces. In cases like this, where I need to use small diameters to paint small, detailed objects, I tend to stick to the basic choices. Moreover, I avoid using a huge amount of layers in the piece, limiting myself to four or five at a time in order to avoid any artificial copy-paste looks.

More reference images.

Composing colors
While I have to admit that I lately treat the color palette composition process rather loosely. Basically, I start off picking a character midtone as well as the main lightsource color. What I then do is simply play with those hues, applying the lightsource color on top of the midtone using different brush modes.

Marking the character
I took a Ragged Hard Round brush and sketched the character very roughly. I'm just wanting to have some basic proportions marked in. This process let me compose the general color layout and get a vague idea of how things are going to look when it's finished.

Defining light sources
At this point when I have a naive sketch done, it's time to start defining the objects. I marked the planned lightsource on top of the sketch, so you can see what I was aiming for. I have one chosen directional light and a very neutral ambient lighting to complement the effect.

Basic character
Before I move onto detailing the face, I push the whole body a bit further. Using the same ragged hard round, I run over the areas picking and applying colors as well as marked in the basic color blobs for lips and eye sockets of the character.