Wanted to share my process for making this painting:
First obviously I had to get the sketch down, this was my first pass so the most changes come at this phase, I personally disliked how Umbra was so covered up so i moved a lot of things around and played to get a better layout- This would've been avoided if i did thumbnails lol
Next was the shading, for big complex peices like this i always start in greyscale, I dont zoom in and I use a big brush to get the basic forms down first, focusing on one flat color, then slowly zoom in and add compelxity and deeper shadow
Last I add the lighting, the lighting isnt always last but it's hard for me to do...so i procrastinate lmao, my aim is to make the contrast as nice as possible (I also. work on the background as well with these same steps)
At this point Im unable to make progress in greyscale and need to move onto color. Coloring is my least favorite step besides the background cause its tedius as fuck, theres multiple ways to add color to a grey scale image and theyre all great for different paintings- For this painting I have set colors I need to achieve for umbra, so something as imprecise as a gradient map wouldnt work so what I ended up doing was selecting each. individual. part. that needed a certain color and using tone curve ( I fucking LOVE tone curve) and then using mulitply or hard light layers to get the darkness or brightness I need as well as to get the desired color
multiply layers are needed becase if I only use hardlight or hue shift I wont get the value I need (Everything is the same medium grey mid-tone, but obviously his skull would be MUCH lighter, and Umbras dark green dress would be MUCH darker) So the basic work flow is -> Section off all bits that would be X color (The gold on Mals clothing for example) -> use tone curve to give the gold an orange/yellow hue, while also making the lights warm, the darks cool -> Use layer modes to further tweak the colors -> repeat until theres no more grey
Once everything is colored correctly I now finally get to merge all of my character layers together (My background layers are also merged, but still it's own seperate layer) and render it out, most of the work is done, the main chunk of rendering here is texture and small details, further color editing to make sure my lights are nice and warm and making it clean (and also adding umbras wings....i always forget his fucking wings)
Then the rendering is done and the only thing left to do is small edits! Grain, paper texture if you'd like, i added some blurring to things moving towards the camera etc...
Finished painting!