Painting Chris Hemsworth

Final painting

Last year I wanted to prove to myself that I could still paint digitally and to finish a mini project at the same time. Then I saw this poster for "Thor Ragnarok"...

The bold color scheme real inspired me to start a painting. If I could capture some feel of this poster, I would be happy. I wanted to focus on the painting process, the subject should be something I was familiar with. So I decided to paint a portrait of Chris Hemsworth as Thor. 

I followed a tried and tested work process; in this respect I did not do anything radical. I just wanted to get back to digital painting after a long hiatus. I constantly checked and rechecked proportions to make sure I got the likeness.

   

In addition, I took my time and painted values as a first pass. Only after I was satisfied enough with the values that I painted the colors.

The first color pass was hard: I got so used to the look of the value painting that the first color pass looked hopelessly bad. Plus, I realized quite late into the color painting that the screen I was working on was abnormally desaturated. The result was an overly saturated painting. Well, good thing it was easy to fix in a digital painting.

   

For this painting I created a custom Photoshop brush. (It was an okay brush, but I felt the need for a better one.) I was pleasantly surprised that adjusting settings of the custom brush was good enough to paint the base of facial hair. I then developed facial hair volume by layering individual strokes.

For the polish layers, I felt I benefited a lot from my experience with compositing. I realized that painting digitally had a lot in common with compositing. For example, I could make the shadows brighter by applying Levels adjustment. Long time ago I would have been unwilling to do this because "everything must be hand painted". Now I could see that this was the flexibility of working digitally. It was something to embrace, not to avoid.

Well, I think I have said what I wanted to say about this painting and my process. Now I am interested to hear your thoughts about them. Is it too safe? Should I have taken more risk? Let me know in the comments below :)