This week I made a last portfolio piece for CTNx. I wanted to practise an environment for my comic. I had this image in my head for this mountain landscape and since I absolutely love being around mountains (since in my country we have none) this was begging me to be painted. Here it is:
I think this is one of my best paintings as of yet. I really felt I could implement some of the things I’ve learned in the last few years.
Here are a few thoughts on my process: I had drawn a little tiny thumbnail in my sketchbooks, not more than a few strokes and dots and a triangle that looked like a mountain. I liked the simplicity of it though, so I tried out some rough sketches in Photoshop and got something that started to look like what I was going for. I wanted a quit, grand environment that made the characters look small and was kind of eerie and beautiful at the same time.
I gathered some reference for light sources in the mountains by night and found some great images of mountain villages. Their lights casts a great, warm light on the mountainside (especially in the snow) that fades to pinkish orange and purple. I used that kind of colourscheme in the sketch.
Read more about keeping your textures and detail in check in Chris Oatley`s painting tutorial about the Texture Monster.
This was a great lesson.I also noticed that, while focussing on the rocks and getting some nice shapes out of them, I had lost sight of my composition and I was actually breaking it. I painted the rocks many times and had to rework it a lot to make them look natural and make them support the lines in my composition. That was the hardest part for me and, now that I think about it, those were the things I probably should have done multiple studies for before putting them in the painting immediately and trying to wing it. Eventually, after getting back to
reference and getting back to broad strokes and gesture, I think I made it work:
