*puts my elbows on your table* so tell us ur process for making the Road to Damascus painting and how long it took!!
Oohhhhh boy, gladly!! (this is the painting btw for anyone who hasn't seen yet)
So that painting is a combination of two different ref pics, one of the church and one of Blanc from one of the promo pics that you've probably seen lots, this one below
You probably didn't want to hear about this part when you asked your Q but I actually spent white a while looking for reference pictures that I thought would make a good painting and were relatively clear enough to use as reference pics, it's a whole process whenever I do a painting because I've used bad/insufficient refs in the past and the final product has turned out not very good because of that. The fact the lighting in a ref isn't right doesn't matter too much for my purposes as long as the ref is clear, I can change the lighting when I render it in my picture.
So anyway once I had my refs and decided what I wanted the picture to look like I just started I guess? I wish I had an earlier wip to show because I put down a generic brown/orange colour layer first and then did a line sketch over it, which you can sort of see in the wip below:
I wish I had saved an earlier wip because the lines were a really important step and took a while because I had to get the perspective right and make sure it was symmetrical and everything was straight etc. All of the perspective lines I hand drew, you can just see the vanishing point where Blanc's leg is, all the perspective lines I drew out from there.
I did this in Photoshop CS6 and idk if there are like perspective grids or whatever you can get, but I kind of enjoy figuring out the perspective the traditional way. I don't have the original lines anymore because I merged them with the colour layer at a certain point, but e.g. with the pews getting bigger and bigger, I used the trick where you can accurately get the positioning of equidistant lines in perspective by drawing diagonals through the middle:
But yeah as you can see from the first wip pic, after the line sketch I blocked in some general background colours then just started rendering the carpet and pews. Both the carpet and pews were on separate layers from the background so that I could work on the shading for specifically those things without affecting the background, I just lock the layer opacity once the shape is there.
Maybe there's a smarter way to do it, I know layer masks are a thing but I never learned how to use those lol
Reason I started with the pews and carpet was because they had the darkest value and also the most saturated colour in the whole picture, and I've learned that with painting you want to put down the darkest and most saturated colours first so that you determine the value/saturation of every subsequent colour by reference to those; you don't go darker or more saturated. Obviously with digital you can just retrospectively adjust, but this means you get the values/saturation more accurate as you work.
So up till this point it was one day's worth of work, maybe 6 hours? Next day which was also maybe about 5-6 hours I rendered the church background:
So this is when I merged the line layer with the colour and just rendered on top of it all.
Third day I painted the chandelier (own layer), Blanc (own layer), and did details like fixing up the pulpit, adding the small objects on the altar(?), and adding various textures like bricks in the walls and roughening up the floor so that it didn't look like a gamecube game or something. This stuff was fairly simple to do, probably 4 hours in total on day three; the hardest work was done in the first two days.
And that's it lol. So all up the painting was about 15 hours roughly? Sorry for long post, I like explaining processes for paintings like these because lots of decisions go into them and there's a lot of work that becomes largely invisible in the final picture but which was still important for the final product looking the way it does. Anyway I'll stop now, if you read this far, thanks for reading, and thanks for sending the ask!!
