Midnight Swim
I’ve been working on trying to improve my skills in anatomy, proportions, and also I’ve been trying to find ways to help me to improve rendering skin. I also wanted to make a point of creating an actual background… I’m kinda lazy, so backgrounds for my paintings are typically very monotone/basic.
This piece is a culmination of various things I’ve been trying to figure out how to achieve better results for my work, and one of the key things that I found has helped me is utilizing not only the clipping masks, but also using the lasso tool to help me be as precise with my shadow shapes as I possibly can, which has resulted in a cleaner render. It can be pretty tedious, but in my opinion, I think it’s a great way to work, and I’m very pleased with how the results turned out from working that way.
I hope you guys like how this piece turned out, and I hope you all have an incredible day! :)
A super rough sketch drawn out first on paper
Refined the sketch and adjusted proportions using liquify and lasso tool. Did a cleaner version for the line art and started to block in basic base colors and some simple shadows.
Refined the shadows and light areas using the lasso tool, and also made some adjustments to the ocean and sky to give it more color and interest.
I continued to refine the light and dark areas throughout the piece using the lasso tool, and using a hard round brush with to smudge the transition tones with a low smudge/blur strength.
Added in a multiply layer on top of all my other layers, and again, I used the lasso tool to cut out the areas that I figured would be lit. My main focus is trying to come up with a good contrast in the image.
Added in an overlay layer to bring some more color and warmth into the image, and I created a few layers on top of everything else to refine the details some more. Eventually I flattened the whole image and played threw it into Lightroom for the finish.