Evening All,
I started this when AB was putting together his shapes guide and only got around to finishing it up tonight, it’s very basic and more or less involved deconstructing an image I’d painted for one of my Halloween Bash cars (Casper).
Anyway, hopefully this will help someone who is totally new to painting get an idea of how a basic image can be constructed, it is by no means the only way to paint this type of image. So experiment and play around and you may find your own way to do things.
So step one was to find a suitable image, I found an old Harvey’s comic cover on google and in the top corner was this interesting little ‘stamp’ which changed from cover to cover of the comic but with Casper in varying comic poses.
I started out by utilising the Bracket from one of the fonts tabs (Lower letters 2 fonts tab - shape 35) - I’ve used this shape many times over the years for anything from outlines to just curved lines within a design element, to intricate fonts. Anyway I sketched his basic outline like so;
Then I pasted a solid white shape behind him to start to fill in the outline - I’ve shown the ‘dogtooth’ shape in this next image as it’s good for both inside and outside curves but in reality I will have used a couple of different primitives to finish the job. I’ve also highlighted a couple of layers I had to put in between the brackets as his fingers go over the line of his chin - easily done once you get your head around the layers stacking on top of each other - i.e. if it’s a solid layer over another the layer the bottom layer won’t be visible.
If I break that down a little more, the bottom layer will be a solid circle filling in the line of his chin, then a bracket for the line of his chin, then a solid shape to form the fingers, with more brackets outlining them on top.
The next step was to add basic features - in this case very basic. A couple of stretched circles for the eyes (black ones slightly larger, with white ones over the top - that ‘stacking’ thing again). The pupils are half circles and his mouth is the ‘pointy circle’ for want of a better description.
Next to add a little shading to him, Casper in this instance is only a two tone guy. So this involved pasting more primitive shapes in a light grey tone below the level of the brackets but above the white base shapes. A couple of basic primitives again & some more brackets, god love them.
I then made the ‘stamp’ shaped background and being a fan of cutting corners wherever possible, I knew there was a shape somewhere in the livery editor which might just do the job at a push. It’s not perfect but it saved a whole boatload of time and frustration (trust me). I ended up using a rarely used shape from the stripes section.
I then had to match the bottom of Casper to the stamp, which was done with a combination of squares, dogtooths & arches as hopefully shown in this next picture. There’s also some curved squares stretched out to form the surprise or puzzlement around Casper’s head.
I finished him off with a little custom and not so custom text and slapped him on the car;
The custom text is pretty much just primitives again, if there was a way to cheat whilst making it, I probably did - I hate text lol.
Anyways that’s how I made Casper - hopefully it gives you some ideas if you’re just starting out.
If you have any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them. There’s a lot of really experienced painters out there nowadays, who are more than happy to help someone else get started on how to paint something. So if I’m not about, anyone else is welcome to chime in.
& thanks AB - I totally stole your backdrops from the shapes guide to try and make this look a little more professional - I think it needed more than that but it was worth a go!
Cheers
D
