Doing a Project from Start to Finish, at 'FARP'

By Danny Staten

Painting the Deity

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The deity was a tremendous challenge to paint. The human figure is something that virtually all artists can improve on. This tutorial is not meant to address the complexities of the figure specifically. I can tell you that the better you can draw the figure, the better you will be at drawing anything. Mastery of the figure is something I am still striving for, and it is one of the indispensable foundations of any type of illustration career. I highly recommend getting a good anatomy book and doing muscle and skeleton studies until you have filled several sketchbooks. I have filled two or three, and still have a long way to go before I have it mastered.

Layers are always a nice tool for painting. I didn’t keep the layers of the painted deity intact in any of my existing backup files so I had to resort to some feedback files I created for my client to show some steps I did. I first established a value I intended to have for the dark, and light elements of the figure. I painted the figure with those values focusing on form and shape rather than details. A good rule to go by is never to move beyond your under painting unless you have a well established separation of light and dark in your under painting. This will give even a basic under painting a feeling of depth and volume. Lacking it will cause your whole painting to appear flat.

I can give you a few pieces of advice for drawing the figure. First, use your pencil or some drawing tool to measure angles between landmarks from your reference. Using measurement verify the relative location of things from several locations. For example measure the angle from the chin to the pelvis, the elbow to the pelvis, the foot to the pelvis, the hand to the pelvis etc etc etc. If you have all those same angles in your drawing you can be confident that the pelvis is placed well. Do this for as many landmarks as you possibly can. One of my teachers would always say, “remember the model is right your drawing is wrong so spend more time looking at the model than your drawing.”

My second piece of advice is to think in terms of shapes not lines. If you can train your eye to see shapes and place those shapes at the right place in the right color you can draw anything. Don’t think of lines when you draw an eye or a nose. Think of the shapes the shadows create and draw those shapes. It feels counterintuitive but it will make a big difference in your drawing. Particularly with faces, the more lines you have the older the face will look.

Once the basic shapes and forms for the figure were established, I used a temporary layer to develop the pattern for the feathers, and started developing the feathers. I kept the drawing of the feathers on its own layer so I could cleanly remove it after I was done. I had been considering using silver and gold, and at this point decided to do that for sure to give the deity more variety and interest.

After I had created this, I looked at some photos of golden statues. Particularly I had a few photos of an Oscar award. I didn’t save that photo unfortunately. However I was reminded in those photos that gold reflects a lot of the colors of its surroundings. In the dark of space, there would be a lot of dark reflections on a reflective gold object. So I used two layers with the air brush to put dark reflections as well as bright highlights on the figure. I did similar things for the silver feathers.

For the wings, I painted the left wing first. Then I mirrored that painting and modified its shading to match the lighting for how it sat. I then did other simple things to that wing to make them different. Notice I didn’t bother to build the wings up where I knew they would be covered. This was partly because it was hard to construct that portion of the wing from the references I had.

A general tip for highlights and shading may prove useful. One key trick to make something look brighter is to darken the area immediately next to it. Also learn how to use reflective light. Almost never will you see the darkest area of an abject be the farthest side from the light source. That is because other objects near by are reflecting a bit of light that then subtly lightens up other things near it. This is called reflected light. If you don’t believe me, put an egg on a table and shine a light on it. You will notice the table (even a black table will do it) reflects a subtle light on the egg on the shadow side. Learning to see and capture reflected light is a critical aspect of making anything look 3d.

For humans, you need to be careful not to overdo this phenomenon. Dark areas are always darker than areas in the light. If you lose that separation of light and dark your person will look metallic. For this gold statue however that is exactly what I wanted. You will notice the strong reflected light around the figure. I let that be the light from the stars, as well as the reflected light from other areas on her body. I also felt that it was important to pop her out of the dark background to have that slight riming effect.

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