Good and Evil

This is the final artwork I'm posting that was done for the Bali Illustration Workshop's assignment. I wanted to have something classic and generic. The focus of this piece is to fully render each individual element to my best capabilities.

I started with a rough grayscale sketch. Next, I blocked in a basic color scheme using a mixture of Multiply, Overlay and Color blending modes. This two steps are the most important steps of my illustration process. I often stop working on paintings if they don't read well at this stage.

My initial idea was for the demon to have a snake body, but later decided against it. The nice thing about working loosely first is that you don't get attached to an idea too early in the process. Here, I've already started detailing the clouds when I made some changes to the mountain range silhouettes and the foreground rock shapes.

For this piece (and the two other Bali pieces) I explored the use of custom brushes. I found one that produce a rather nice effect of snow and stuck to it. In general, I prefer to keep my brush palette limited as I'm quite lazy to manage them. I also find it difficult to blend between the grainy and photo-real textures of certain brushes with the more basic brushes (like the no. 19).

After the background, I begin working on the two characters. I did design sketches of them on a separate canvas as I wanted to get a feel of how these characters will look at other angles. Since character design isn't something I'm keen on focusing for this piece, I went with the first design that came to my head. I also found a very helpful reference image of some fire smog and am quite happy with my replication of that effect on the demon.

I received feedbacks that the angel's wings looked like they will not be able to function due to their tiny size. I went back to enlarge them to a be more proportional to her body.

Foreground added and the painting is almost done...

Added some particle effects and the painting is done!