BG Tonal

Okay, so our second project this year was more or less review from last year so I wasn't so stressed with it as I was the fish. But I didn't have a lot of free time this last week because of family stuff to work on it. I wanted to love the lines, but ran out of time, so what you see is the finish.

I started it the with a completely grey background, and working on the light and seeing how it would work in the real world without complicating it. I then put some shading in it, and then darkened it to give it a softer light look, as not to make it an over-bearing light, plus it gave it more emotion in the making, so I got two birds with one stone in that hit.

Other than that it was a pretty standard pen busting digital project.

Digital Fish painting breakdown

So our first assignment in Digital painting class was to paint a fish...easy enough right? Wrong!
I started off painting a flounder, the fish with both eyes on one side, and that was an epic failure, and 3 hours I'll never get back.
So I started to paint this tropical fish, I forget the technical name, but it's the same fish Dory was in Finding Nemo.
I started with the usual, line arts to flats, and a threw in some rough shading. I noticed the fish looked like it had freckles so I had to add those to the nose area. And for the teeth I made them more human like because I thought it was cuter and I didn't want to go for realism too too much for my fishy.
Then when it came to the scales, in a separate file I made about ten up in a template and masked them over my fish. Then I realized that looked awful, so I painted new shading and lighting over each one...aka hours of work just for the scales. So them I continued throwing in multiplay layers and screen layers to finish him off, including the fins. And I threw in a quick background and blurred it to focus more on my fishy.