[Progresswork] Unbroken

As I forgot to post this along with the painting, I may as well use the comic as an excuse and do it now. Those two things have more in common than one may think. So here's the breakdown of Unbroken, an illustration done for the Wintersday Zine 2018. Back then, it was a replacement piece for the latest comic, which was to be my original zine submission until it became clear that due to my dayjob and mailing of some 1300+ Tyrian Tarot boxes which happened at the same time as the zine deadline will leave me unable to finish the latter.

Fortunately, I had a replacement doodle to offer from earlier.

1) This is one of the pieces that started without any particular vision, I was just running my brain on idle during a painting break and scribbled several random... not even ideas at that point, to be honest. Only when the lines came together I started to build around them with "oh, it could be these two, and it could be in a jungle somewhere...", since their mention in Heart of Thorns was fresh at the time (which means this part of the picture has to be from late 2015/early 2016).

2) Intrigued, I refined the doodle later, if not for any particular reason, then to at least remember who is actually in it (you'd be rather amused if you saw the amount of PSD files I have lying around where even I can't tell what the heck's on the original doodle). Making a messy, hardpoint-type sketch like this is something I try to do more often because it's both easier on my wrist and allows me to keep the sketch looser and more dynamic. Convincing my brain to stop worrying about the messy part is where it gets difficult, however.

3) Last of the original progress batch. This was (and sometimes still is) my go-to painting style for quite a while – apply colors in broad, messy strokes to get the light down and then use blur filter to get a good underpainting that blends the colors a bit and provides the whole thing with a bit of a diffused light. (I captured the process while painting The Lady with the Tits.)

At this point, I saved the painting to my in-progress folder and let it rest there for a while while I... don't remember what I was doing at this point because it's about half a decade, but it was presumably more interesting than this particular painting.

4) I came back a few months later (it had to be within the same year, because the brushwork on Galina's face is a brush I don't use for painting, but it had to be me being lazy to swap from working on comic borders in Evolutus/other SF tie-ins). The break helped, as I was quickly able to correct the overly green hues and some of the anatomy wonkiness of the original sketch. I also added what ended up being pretty much the final color/light balance with the green-tinted secondary lighting. 

And this is where it was left of for about a year and a half. I didn't particularly dislike it, I just never felt strongly enough about it to actually finish it. My inability to set on a decent brush helped postponing, too.

However, this piece helped bail out my tail when I needed it most. Due various time-related misjudgements on several projects I was part of (misjudgements of other people than me, for a change x), everything converged instead of spacing out over the Summer/Fall 2018 and I ended up with way too much on my plate at a single point in time – major work deadline binge, providing moderator feedback/quality check on a zine, mailing 1300+ tarot boxes and finishing my own zine submission. Making that submission a comic simply wasn't an option. However, I had a thematically identical painting in the works, and so it was summoned from the depths of the in-progress folder to save my hide.

It was a rare combination of elements, really – a painting far enough in progress that I could finish it with the schedule I had, featuring not just the same characters but also being thematically identical, and one that can be trimmed down to fit the zine format perfectly, with the page division going exactly between the characters and not cutting off anything important.

At this point, things were pretty straightforward.

5) I fixed the rest of Galina's snout and focused on the faces first, getting the focal point of the entire image out of the way. I also incorporated some more influences from the comic – most prominently Snarl's facial wounds and his lack of nasal ring (I basically use the comic story as an excuse to take it off him by assuming he lost it during the accident, so he has a bit more of a unique face than this particular model allows in-game). Speaking of focal points, I wasn't exactly planning this, but they still fit pretty well on the ratio spiral at this point:

6) Adding the rest of the major painting details such as Snarl's braids and Galina's armor. At this point, everything's down to busywork, just stroke after stroke of filling out the canvas with various fur strands and armor details. Which was honestly about as much brain activity as I was capable of at the time.

7) Once the detailwork was done, all that was left was a final pass. I adjusted shadows for better depth, brought up the highlights and added whiskers as well as stray hairs here and there. As one last addition, I went back to my old trick that I used with some of the SF comic pages and added two more layers, both filled with randomized color splotches of certain hues set to overlay and dark light, both on very, very low opacity that makes them virtually invisible unless you know exactly what to look for. (You can see them pretty easily if you take images 6 and 7 and flick back and forth between them.) I used this in a comic to add subtle natural color variation to certain things. Here, it's used to subtly simulate scattered light in forest-like environments.

And that's it, that's how you paint Snarl & Galina.

Oddly enough, this remains one of the few paintings of mine that I don't actively dislike, which is why it tends to be one of my go-to showpieces whenever someone asks me for a portfolio. Which may be a bit dishonest, since I'm not exactly sure I could replicate it on demand.

Still, it was fun to paint for the most part (the hard deadline thing kind of sucked, but that's mostly because at that point, I was allowed between 2 and 4 hours of sleep a day). It also doesn't hurt that these two were and still remain to be my most favorite characters of the entire game.

That's it for today. I hope you found things informative, and I'll share some comic-related news/bonus rounds next.