Starting with a quick sketch that was done on the iPad, just laying around one evening with brushes and textures and it ended up turning into a little painting from imagination

One of the main challenges continues to be the use of physical textures overlayed onto the digital painting (or working under them in this case). Still hard to get the right balance as a lot of marks from the painting get lost with the texture over them. Also the texture is a little dominant in this – have been working on the settings to try and get it to blend in a bit more naturally – here the shadows of the texture are a little too black.

The next few were digital work done from some of my reference photo work. In the first one I was looking at separating out the shadow from the mid & light – thinking about how this can be used as a reference for the dark wash layer (using the traditional technique of building up dark colours slowly with layers of thin washes. Done in photoshop and then a combination of digital and manual blurring.

This was then a very quick digital rendition with the black shadow layer masked and then painted in. It is clear that the shadow layer edges are far too crisp even after the blurring and softening

The next one used a similar principle but this time with a drawn sketch for the dark wash areas

Kept the painting very loose

And the brought the two together and worked up the painting a bit more.

Overall, getting agood balance of mark making, colours shapes and textures. Looking back on this – quite pleased with this for a rough bit of work.