5 Stages of Digital Portrait Painting: From Warriors to Centaurs
Julia Lerchbaumer shattered her comfort zone with three incredible digital portraits of very different characters. In each image, Julia demonstrated awareness of facial features and masterful use of light. Follow her three portraits: Aurum, Kratos, and Dark Centaur through each stage to see how Julia achieved her final products:
Hi, my name is Julia and I am from Austria. I’ve been working as a professional 2D Graphic artist at IGT Austria for nearly 7 years now. I am responsible for in-game graphics of casino slot games. The company made it possible for me to participate in the amazing CGMA course “Digital Portrait Painting” taught by Mélanie Delon. I attended this specific course because I wanted to develop my skills when it comes to human portraits, as this is one of my main focuses at work.
"I’m now able to use my newly gained skills to improve the quality of our company’s and my personal art. I gained a lot of self-esteem from this course and improved everything in my digital portrait art skills."
1. Reference
AURUM
Aurum, the Latin word for gold, was the inspiration for my first portrait. A main focus in the games I work on is creating pretty female characters, which need to attract gamers and represent the mood and theme of the game. I wanted to sharpen my skills when it comes to female face features.
KRATOS
In absolute contrast to my Aurum portrait, this one here should represent melancholy, silence, bleakness, and darkness. I got my inspiration from watching my boyfriend playing God of War. I must admit, I am not a gamer at all, but I really liked the character development Kratos went through in the first God of War games to now. His design is amazing and the whole game has such a great mood. So, I did this first sketch.
DARK CENTAUR
I wanted to do a fantasy creature, so I gathered three different kinds of reference images to capture the mood I was going for. I love instruction from the first (left), the pose and elegance of the second (middle), and the grace and dramatic reflection of the third (right).
My first intention was to design my centaur's image like one of these old black and white portraits, like the one below. I loved the stoic poses, the dramatic lighting, and the general feeling of history and culture.
2. Compositions
AURUM
Our game characters have to be pleasant to a wide range of customers. So, I needed to learn how to push the most feminine facial features, like lips and eyes, to look pleasant to a wide range of people and meet the general beauty standard― Full lips and detailed, big eyes. I wanted to use purple/pink and gold to create a perfect complementary contrast and an overall warm mood. Painting the liquid gold was a challenge. It was difficult for me to make it look realistic and let it follow the face structure of my character, without ruining it.
KRATOS
I wanted attention to flow through the center of the picture, where the light rays come from above. I wanted to point out his sad expression, then lead the eye further down to his hands. One held an axe against his chest and the other held snow/ashes. This has something to do with the story of the game itself. There was a really moving scene in the game that made me cry and I wanted to capture this essence in my portrait: A brutal fighter, a good father to his son, and a loving, caring husband.
Read "6 Steps to Master Illustration Composition: From Apartment Scenes to Ghoulish Posters" to learn how various scenes can be framed to direct the eye.
My goal was to make a sort of melancholic and cold, sad portrait of him. As the game had a realistic style, I also wanted to achieve a very realistic design for my portrait. Because of that, I needed to start working with dull and dark colors. Since I normally work with bright and saturated colors, this proved to be a challenging contrast.
DARK CENTAUR
My centaur woman didn't mirror the old black and white portraits exactly the way I envisioned, but I still used some of those elements to capture a feeling of honor. My centaur turned out way more futuristic, so I used a really strong and artificial light. Not especially traditional, but I think it was a good design choice that fit the character. I chose the bright background light to create a nice contrast against her black skin and “mane.”
3. Bold Choices
This week was about cleaning up the mess.: defining facial features, review skin colors, and adjust the lighting. Kratos got a little bit left behind at this point because I concentrated more on the other two portraits, as they needed way more correction than he did.
At this stage, I merged my whole design together so I could paint over the image. There was no use in collecting layers because I already knew they wouldn't be a part of the final product.
AURUM
I worked on the light of Aurum a bit more and had a lot of trouble with her face, especially with the gold that's poured over her. I couldn't decide between making the gold in-your-face or subtle. In the first picture, it looked like lemonade and in the second attempt, it was way too overwhelming and ruined the whole structure of her face. Her eyes still looked off. They were too far apart from each other and looked like they got pushed inside her head. Her nose gave me headaches as well. I could not get that part of her face right for the life of me.
DARK CENTAUR
I had a similar experience with my centaur lady. The first sketch looked dull, everything looked flat and the lighting was lame. The light was nothing special and the character’s features looked boring. I was told to push everything way more and use some intense color as a second light source, to make everything pop out. Even if the light source is not realistic. I needed to be more confident and try it, as it will help me make my portrait way more interesting to look at.
As I mentioned before, I wanted to reflect the same effect a pure black horse coat has, but I was too shy at first to use this on a humanoid creature. Mélanie told me to be more confident with what I am doing and want to do. She grabbed my sketch and slapped darker, more intense color all over the character and it already had a huge impact on the whole look of it. Then she started to shape her face and body structure just by adding light. I was amazed and motivated by that, as you may see in the huge step I made between the two graphics.
4. Colors and Nose Jobs
AURUM
For Aurum, refining the portrait was killer. It was so hard for me to make her face as symmetrical as possible, without flipping her every minute or copying parts to the other side. I wanted to make her face symmetrical because I was taught that this is the best way to make a character look appealing and beautiful. But I soon realized that this is not the case. Maybe it is in the model industry, but not in real life and not in this course. For me, noses are my kryptonite. I hate drawing them and I really struggled with the look of it.
Mélanie managed to make me understand how to get things straight and look nice. She erased the whole nose I had done before and showed me again. I found that I was making the nose stick out too much. It was the most notable feature even though I wanted to focus on eyes and lips. I also struggled because the nose handles more light sources and angles than other features. But Mélanie explained these things as we reconstructed the nose. She also helped me to get rid of that alien look of her.
Perfect your facial drawing skills with CGMA's Head Drawing and Construction course.
KRATOS
For Kratos, this stage was the hardest part. Mostly because I needed to make him as recognizable as he was realistic. He is such an iconic guy and I wanted to do him justice. I worked this stage over and over again and still wasn’t really satisfied. But I really love his beard.
I merged the last week’s steps and worked all over it. Thanks to another suggestion from Mélanie, I added way more different hints of color in his face now, to make him look more alive and made of flesh and blood. In the steps before, he looked dead because I just used a blue and grey color palette.
I reworked his eye shape and position as well as the shape of his nose and mouth. It was a bit difficult for me to shape his lower lip, as the upper part of the lips is covered by his beard, which makes it harder to get his expression right. I also started working on tiny details, such as the light that shines through his ear from behind and the tiny veins in it. The scar across his eye, every single hair of his beard, added stroke by stroke, same as the fur of his armor. This part was full of adding more and more details to the whole character.
Read "4 Ways Design Can Transform Your Comic’s Narrative: Monsters Among Us" to learn more about working with a muted color palette.
DARK CENTAUR
Dark centaur lady looks pretty good already. I tried to tweak the realistic, human aspects a bit here. I curved the spot between nose and forehead. On the other hand, I tried to honor the horse part as well. I gave her a very long, bowed neck, long, pinned ears, and an almost black skin to mirror the fur of a black horse. The idea to give her this intense lighting was a very good choice. Dull pink, sort of orange, light from the back, and then this crazy blue accent, from the top right corner. I love it.
Playing with the light, and giving her more and more contour through light, was so much fun. I also had no problems with her facial features because she didn't have to look like a human. A humanoid fantasy creature does not have to follow all the rules a human face has to.
5. Last Minute Touch Ups
In the end, I love how every single one of my final portraits turned out. I never imagined that I would be capable of creating such great artwork. Why? Maybe because I felt so secure in my comfort zone of simple characters and animal paintings. I absolutely want to continue with the paintings if my time schedule allows it.
Aurum is pretty much done. I like how she is and don’t really want to change her.
Kratos needs some extra work, as I could not manage to finish him during the 8-week course. I
The centaur, well, she needs a haircut. As she is the only one of the three characters with hair, this part of her needs way more attention from my perspective. I rushed her hairstyle and sadly made it look like a fuzzy mess, especially the part at her neck. I want to make it look way better by defining the curls more and giving them in shape.
Final Thoughts
- At the beginning of this course, human characters were not my strength at all. I already struggled with positioning facial features (eyes, nose, mouth). I also had to overcome my fear of using many different skin tones. While working on these projects, I learned of the power of slight red or orange blush on cheeks or a faint blue inside of the eyeball.
- I’ve grown a lot from this course. I’m now able to use my newly gained skills to improve the quality of our company’s and my personal art. I gained a lot of self-esteem from this course and improved everything in my digital portrait art skills.
- The feedback was amazing. Melanie managed to do it with so much joy in her voice and encouraged me to give my best and follow her precise instructions. In all my years as an artist, I never had such a great teacher like Mélanie. She didn't just tell you to slap colors here and there and then— voila, done. She actually explained how certain artistic choices impacted a painting.
- Melanie was also very supportive. She always focused on how the art was working, not how it was bad. It's small, but I liked that she always thanked me for my submissions before providing feedback. She really appreciated everything that her students did in this course and she articulated that so well. That is what makes her a good teacher and I definitely recommend her course to all my friends, colleagues and other artists.
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Read 6 Steps to Master Illustration Composition: From Apartment Scenes to Ghoulish Posters to learn how various scenes can be framed to direct the eye.
Perfect your facial drawing skills with CGMA's Head Drawing and Construction course.
Read "4 Ways Design Can Transform Your Comic’s Narrative: Monsters Among Us" to learn more about working with a muted color palette.
