Silhouette Digital Paintings

For this practice task in class we learned a new method of digital painting which is practised and used by Feng Zu, a famous concept artist for both movies and games. The method itself involves painting the concept as a pure black silhouette to create a strong outline and then on separate layers working the painting up with various tones of greys and shadows to bring the flat silhouette to life. I found this method of painting particularly hard as I was fine with creating the silhouette and found this worked really well but when going back into the painting and working it up I felt lost and not sure where to start and much preferred the last method of using the outline and then painting over this.

For this task we had to use the subject of Crustaceans as a reference and create some monster like concepts from this. The first stage in the painting process was to create the black silhouettes of my creatures ( as shown below) using various images as reference and merging these together to create interesting, strong outlines.

 The next  set of stages once I was happy with my silhouettes was to start painting into them using various tones of grey and whites to build up a 3D look and to also add a dark grey shadow underneath each concept to ground them and stop them from floating around on the page to give them a sense of realism and weight.

 Once I was happy with the way I had worked up my concepts I then added a strong background colour to lift the black silhouettes off the page and towards the viewer.

For my final stage I then took my favourite concept ( middle one) and created a new layer above this creatures layer and changed the layer setting to Colour Dodge to keep the highlights and shadows showing when colour was added on top. I then chose a bright blue colour to clash against the orange background and to keep to the ocean theme.

I am not 100% happy with my final piece but I feel as though I really struggled with this painting method and considering that I am impressed with my overall pieces for what they are and really like my middle concept once the splash of colour was added over the top as I feel this really brought the concept to life.