Digital painting process

I started working on the next Queen painting. It starts out really messy and confusing. But I just want to get colors down. All I’m using is the brush tool and the smudge took for blending (again, using skin texture brushes from Obsidian Dawn).

I used an adjustment layer halfway through to shift the skin tone a little warmer/rosier. There’s a lot of back and forth with this process: lay down a color, evaluate, adjust, repeat. And also comparing it to the original sketch.

A tablet makes digital painting so much easier. I know there are artists who paint with just a mouse but I really don’t understand how. Unless they’re working in Illustrator and doing vector art. My tablet is old. It’s a Wacom Graphire 2. I don’t even remember when that came out (2000? 2001?). But it’s totally serviceable. It definitely doesn’t compare to a Cintiq but it works.

This needs to sit overnight. Then I’ll look at it again. I know I need to do more work on the face.