Hello again – I hope everyone is doing well. I know I have been lacking in updates lately but it is for a good reason. I swear! Instead of having a lot of doodles and scribbles – which I know people love – I am trying to expand my illustration portfolio with some digital artwork. I am currently working on another digital painting piece but this time I am going to work a little more with textures and brushes.

I received some good advice from some people on Forrst, an online community of designers and developers to share ideas and help each other and ask for advice, I recently posted my previous digital painting of January Jones after I touched it up to get some feedback. I am taking the advice and expanding my techniques.

I am working on my next piece called “Sleeping Beauty”. Here are the first few steps as I just started this today. Enjoy and comments are welcome!

Always start with a sketch to get down the composition of the piece – I am working on a 5×7 canvas for this piece (reason to my madness-will explain later):

Once I get the sketch or rough down, I proceed to do a rough grayscale of shadow and tone. On this next step I went a little ahead of myself and started to add color. I am sure I will end up going backwards later to fix the tone of the hair

Now that I blocked out some shadow and tone I go ahead and block out the colors for the skin tone.

This is what I have done so far. I will have more as I progress through this piece. I am excited to see where it takes me, I am kind of going with the flow on this – I do have some thoughts on textures but I want to see where the brush takes me.

Talk to everyone soon!