Digital Process

Happy 4th of July everyone!
To celebrate I thought I'd share my digital process on my most recent piece, my tribute to Ronnie James Dio.

When I start a digital piece I like to use a pink color (at 50% opacity) to do the under sketch. I'm using CS5.5 and they have a brush option where the brush has a feathered end. I like using this one because it mimics using a brush and I prefer the quality of lines I can create with it.


Next I use a solid black to draw out my line art on another layer.


For this one I figured out the colors as I went but usually I prefer to have at least values and an idea of colors figured out ahead of time. It really does save on headaches. I do the colors on various other layers underneath the line art.


I color the foreground and then do the back ground last.


When I'm done I save a Photoshop file with all the layers, then I smush it together (flatten) and save it as a Tiff, then make smaller jpeg versions with watermarks for putting online. I like to save larger files of everything in case I want to print it or use it for something else later. I learned the hard way not to flatten your only file of a image in case you need to edit them later :/

Well, that's how I work digitally. I hope you all have a great 4th of July! Stay safe and have fun!