Painting A Potion Bottle

• Software: GIMP (or Adobe Photoshop)
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Potion Bottle

A potion bottle may seem like quite a complex thing to paint even for a simple shaped one due to all the reflections and colorful contents. But a pretty straigthforward workflow makes it easier.

Lineart and flats

Make use of extensive guide lines in a separate layer to get the shape of the bottle right. You could even use other tools like Inkscape - for now, I just went free hand.

You may imagine the potion bottle to be quite colorful with bright colors and think of using brighter colors as flats. But choose some dark value color - it is the contrast of the bright colors against the dark ones that makes it look colorful.

Painting back to front

The key to paintinig objects with transparency is to render them from back to front. Here, the far side glass is rendered first, and then the containing liquid and the cork.

Once this is done, using the line art as a guide by keeping it over all the layers and toggling its visibility, paint over the front side of the glass surface using a pressure sensitive brush.

Dont go overboard and cover everything up. Remember that glass tends to be opaque as its angle goes perpendicular to viewing angle. So the sides would be opaque and the middle would be fully transparent.

Highlights

Highlights are what makes potion bottle interesting subject to paint. Using the sketch as a guide, paint over a lighter and saturated hue of the colors for the blue of the glass and also for the liquid.

Use a larger brush, with lower transparency and paint over and around the highlights to signify diffusion. Take another brighter tone - almost white color - and paint over again and some points for the ’super highlights’.

Finishing Touches

Take a darker and duller tone of blue and mark out some of the bottles outline.

For the liquid, take a darker but more saturated tone and mark out its outline. Do not go over the highlights when you do this.

You are done! Do post links to your works in the comments below.

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