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matt@azhdarcho.com

Making of "Upon Branch"

Ok, so as always, step one is getting together a roght sketch using a good skeletal reconstruction (in this case, by Jaime Headden). I also googled around for reference photos (especially good pictures of ginkgo leaves). The coloration is based on a photo of a Black Phoebe I had in my ref folder, and I found a photo of a Forest Rock-thrush that helped with the pose. I made a few layers here (using Photoshop CS 8, by the way, though any Photoshop verison will do). One layer for the sketch, one with a grey bg (neutral tone works better than white for the initial steps). Keep an eye on the layers as this progresses.

In the layer I made for color blocking, I start filling in a base. Highlights will come later. I'm mostly using a brush with flow set at around 20, and I set the opacity jitter to correspond with pen pressure (I use a 6x8 Graphire 3 WACOM tablet).

At this point I get sick of using the low flow, so I switch to about 60% and to block the remaining ginkgo leaves and Epi's base colors, eploying the paint bucket as needed (this always leaves a nasty transparent "crack" at the fill border, but cleaning it up is easier than brushing in a huge area).

Next comes the highlights. I set my brush back to low flow and, using my guide image, try to make the feathers look somewhat natural. This part is easier if you make a few new strokes on a new layer, merge it down, and repeat. That way, if you mess up really badly, or try something out that ends up looking like bollocks, you can just delete the top layer and start that part over without erasing all the hard work that came before, safely merged in your main highlights layer. Using a blur on the highlights before merging down sometimes helps make them blend better, and look more painting-like. With feathers, the smudge tool is often good too.

Once I'm satisfied with the dino, I move on to the leaves, and sketch in the moss on the branch. After the hell I go through on the left ginkgo sprout, I realize the overly-complexly shades righthand leaves will take me a week. i'll just do a simple highlight job on those and move most of them to the background, focusing on the leaf he's pulling towards him (those dark patches will unexpectedly come in handy for highlighting...).

Sure enough, by using a think eraser in strokes parallel to the leaf vanes, the dark areas actually look good as highlights. I throw in some lighter ones, then start my favorite part: gausian blurryness! I replace the gray bg with a light yellow-green, and using a big solid brush, block in some vague branches and leaf patches and such. I lock the branch layer so I can highlight it without going outside the lines. Asl ong as it's got at least three shades, it doesn't matter how bad it looks, since I'm just gonna blur it anyway. I merge the branches down onto the yellow layer, and gausian blur until it looks like an out of focus photo. I do another gausian 9but much more subtle) on the right-hand leafy patch (I've already cut the primary leaf into a new layer so it will not go out of focus with the rest).

While it's not as apparent in this style painting as it is in things like my Green Jack scene, I merge the subkect layers onto each other, duplicate them, knock the opacity of the duplicates down to less than half, set them to multiply, and blur them. This can sometimes give the foreground stuff a little bit of a glow, and is basically just a neat lighting effect. As a finishing touch I throw a lense flare onto the blurry bg at the point where my light source would be (I tried to make the lighting in this one sort of green and vague, as if its scattering/filtering through dense foliage, so the exact point doesn't matter so much). I also take the burn tool, make it real big, and use it to make some dense shadows on the log. This even works well for some extra highlighting on the blurry background and the leaves. I sign it, size it into a deviantArt print template that sort of matches it (10x15 in this case), and fill the extra space with black. I make a similar smaller version for my site, slap on the binomial, and pass out in front of Adult Swim.