Ok I decided to make a guide to show how I do when I paint my creatures and I’m going to use Mafro as example. Notice that this isn’t a guide to the program I use; it’s a guide to the style and technique I use.
Ok, I decided I wanted to evolve the Marollon and make a picture were it is swimming close to the seabed with lots of vents and rocks. So I start with sketching the midground and parts of the background with black, size 1, 50% transparent.
I then finish the sketching with different layers of background.
Now its time to start painting! I begin with a colour fill of teal at about 80% so that the sketching still can be seen.
Using the brush at 20% at the layer most far away and about 80 at the midground I colour the layers with a gradual change in darkness to the picture a feeling of depth.
I carefully blur the edges of the layers.
That’s the background for now. Now its time to fill in the sketched rocks with 100% black.
Then many layers of about 5% grey makes the rocks grey enough for a black line to show clearly where the rock in the front goes.
With a size 1, 4% brush with a light grey (close to white) I paint many small lines on the smallest rock to give it shading and light. The edges get more lines so they are paler. It’s smart to paint the smallest rock first to test and train so you are ready and sure about the technique when its time for the bigger rocks.
I do the same thing with the rest of the rocks.
The texture I get with this technique is great for rocks, though I feel like they look a bit TOO rough. Therefore, I use a size 5, 15% brush with grey to make a layer over all of the rocks making the dark colours paler and the pale colours darker. This makes the rocks look less rough.
With a technique partly similar to the one I used on the rock, I start to cover the ground with camogreen. It’s important to only paint horizontal lines when painting the ground.
With this layer, I cover the whole midground in an equal layer of green.
I continue with a similar lined layer of brown...
And another one of dark brown.
A normal layer of around 30% brown/beige is then applied. I also draw some blurred thick black lines at the edge of the midground.
The top of this line that is outside the midground edge is painted over, leaving a sharp edge that is blurred on the other side.
That does it for a midground for now! Now its time to start with the vents in the background. With the eyedrop tool I take the colour from each layer and paint vent shaped blobs at each of the background layers.
Now with a 20% size 1 brush with black I paint the edges, holes and some rocky features on the vents.
Using a brush tool called "paint splatter" I then draw bubble streams of different sizes (smaller bubbles closer the vent and bigger higher up).
The vents that are closer have off course got bigger bubbles.
Since the "paint splatter" tool creates paint splatter at random, it is easy that you get some paint where you don’t want paint. This is easily painted over by using the eyedropper to get the right colour.
Now its time to add a vent to the midground. On this one, I use a technique very similar to the one I used on the rocks. I start with pure black.
This is a bit different from the rocks. Instead of working my way to the right colour, I paint the base colour in a 100% layer. This will make the vent paler as well as not as rough.
With a black size 1 at about 5%, I then add shading in a similar way as I did with the rocks, but reversed!
Now that should do with black!
To add some highlights I draw some size 1, 5% white lines to the outstanding edges…
