Me and my wife got in to Game of Thrones at the end of season 3 and we were hooked in about 2 hours. Constantly watching the show meant I had to do a few GoT characters and this image of Daenerys felt like the right one to attempt. As you can see from the finished image, I got quite an interesting effect by thickly applying the digital oil brush in Artrage – My favorite comment on Instagram was that it looked like frosting and that’s a pretty accurate description
I created the painting using the following equipment:
- Artrage – Digital painting program for Windows, Mac and tablet. I used the Windows desktop version of the software for this piece
- Wacom Intuos 4 Graphics Tablet – A graphics tablet is a “must have” item for desktop based digital art and Wacom has always been my weapon of choice
- Camtasia Studio – While posting updates on this drawing I was getting quite a few comments in Instagram about tracing photographs so I decided to start screen capturing my process. I got it in time to capture the background and have only great things to say about Camtasia Studio
Progress Photos
When painting portraits either digitally or with physical media, I draw out guide lines on the edges and through the center. This is where I feel I am more obsessed than talented because if it’s not right, (and that happens a lot) I delete the line and do it again until it is perfect. The great thing with digital art is that ctrl+Z (undo) makes this much easier than with physicall media.
Digital painting has many advantages over painting with physical media. The hours of set up time, waiting for paint to dry and cleaning up to name a few. One of my favorites however, is the ability to sample colors from reference photographs.
Building color
Adding the background
I mentioned at the start that towards the end of this painting I bought some screen capturing software to help show my process more. The video above shows how I used the oil paint and palette knife feature of Artrage to create the background.
This is one of my favorite pieces I have ever created (digitally or physically) – I love the texture of it and it has an almost Monet like quality to it in the sense that the further away you get, the better it looks but even up close it looks interesting.