Painting

• Software: GIMP or Adobe Photoshop
• Level: Intermediate
• Subject: Glowing Objects - Lightning

This tutorial is a short one, but would be explaining an intermediate level of digital painting technique. It is a walkthrough of painting a lightning against a moderately dark plain sky. Once you understand the technique, you should be able to apply the same technique for painting variations in the subject - sparkles, energy beams, or light sabers.

When painting a glowing energy streak - remember to choose a color palette that is contrasting in terms of value. You may want to choose contrasting color too to help in composition of the piece but may not be always possible (it would be weird to draw a blue colored flame).

For this example, I used a moderately dark blue for the sky. It is just not possible to get the right effect of a lightning against a white background.

This step might seem a bit counter-intutive. Use a soft edged round brush, take a color even darker than the background and paint over the area roughly where you would be painting the lightning. Even it the lighting seems to glow, to achieve a bright effect, putting an even darker background helps achieve the contrast.

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• Software: GIMP / Photoshop (or even any other sketching tools)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Gogor - Giant Assassin

I left of at the cleaned up lineart in the last part. This installment would contain a little details on the color palette.

Color Palette

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• Software: GIMP / Photoshop (or even any other sketching tools)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Gogor - Giant Assassin

This would be another character for The Assassin Order - a personal project of mine. Check out the other two characters - Anwun and Kitar.

Concept

There are times when The Assassin Order is faced with necessity of brute force for some quest it has taken. Those are the times when the skills of Gogor - the Giant Assassin - is called upon. His opponents repent when they think he is a simpleton - his war-hammer technique leaves no room for other thought than escape.

After a couple of thumbnail sketches, I study the different anatomical features until I am comfortable with it. Note that since he is a giant, I try to keep his anatomy around 9 to 10 heads tall.

Lineart

Once I am comfortable and decide on the pose, I work on the basics and get the pose anatomically correct.

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• Software: GIMP (or Adobe Photoshop)
• Level: Advanced
• Subject: Kitar - Potion Assassin

Starting off from where I left, I start to detail the different parts of the character.

Details

Using the palette from the last part, the mid tones are painted in the bottle. Note that I plan to make this bottle quite a bit more opaque than the earlier study - Painting A Potion Bottle.

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