Varda, Elbereth Gilthoniel

Ola, Sketchy Folks

It's been a little while since I share anything with you guys. I been busy learning Blender and how to texture using nodes. That and I was busy with a sculpt for the #Splinterlands art contest which turned out awesomely. In between, I decided to paint my follow-up up for my Silmarillion project... Varda.

Varda, Elbareth (low res).jpg

Process

I did a couple of sketches before landing on this one. Fun fact, this isn't the first time I tried to paint Varda. I couple of weeks back I worked the previous version up to a two tone blocking. But I just wasn't feeling it. I'd share it, but it's in another cloud account different to the one I've synced to my laptop know.

I felt like crap leaving it undone and appending. So I worked through a number iterations for ideation. I finally landed on a design sketch that I felt would work .

Bringing it into the photoshop via scan, I went on to block-in the values and render them to mid-frequency. I later used the gradient map on the black and white. The low value I made warmer and the middle values cool. While the gradient map is on, I continue doing my rendering in the layers underneath it. After that, it's a matter of applying a number of blend layers to block-in the color I want to use. When that's been done I done all the rest for the rendering above all the layers.

If you're interested in how did the light fx on the paint watch this video tutorial >>>