Alien Caterpillar Digital Drawing

For our second digital drawing session we learned a new digital drawing technique of first starting with a line drawing and scanning this in by hand, for this assignment we already had a line work file provided for us which we then cleaned up using the levels tool in Photoshop to make the lines more of a grey tone rather than black.

We then had to apply base colours to the drawing using a colour palette given to us to get the basics of the drawing down. We created this on a new layer and changed the layer mode to multiply to see the line work through the colours.

After putting down the base colours we then hid the base colour layer and created a new layer to create the shadows. To do this we changed the layer mode to multiply again and used a 60% grey colour and applied this using reference images to the line work drawing to add some dimension to the piece.

After putting down the shadows we then created another new layer and un-hid the base colour layer, and on this new layer we then built up the piece by blending the shadows and the base colours and applying highlights and details to the overall piece.

I am really pleased with this final piece and really enjoyed this method of painting as I found it the quickest way to get the colours down and the concept and then add detail in stages to build up the painting to a successful final piece.