The Entrance

Woman on Mars

Rhino Warrior

Hulk Vs Superman

Wizards Journey

Distant Castle

My first fantasy painting for quite some time...

Cold Mountain

Prisoner

Shape Of Things To Come

Dracula

Siren

I took part in an art challenge which was to create an alient siren. You can find my entry with the others here.

Monster Ball

My last painting of 2010 (just about got it in).

Rock & A Hard Place

I seem to be picking up the pace again - I managed to do this in about 3 hours in one night.

The Bridge

It has been a month since I have finished a painting so it is slower than usual but here it is. I have a tutorial on how I painted this half way done so check back later for the update.

Digital Art Techniques - How to Paint Landscapes

http://www.markearlam.com/p/techniques.htmlFor my next turorial I want to show you how I make up backgrounds without using references. I still use references for the details of the painting after this step but you still need a starting point so lets get to it.

I am not going to show you how to create a certain background from start to finish because that would be a waste of time. I find a tutorial that does that shows you how to make that exact painting and nothing else.

This is more of a re-usable guide on how to create something from nothing and then it is up to you where you take it from there.

So here we start with a figure I have already painted for another painting and she is in black and white (this is important and you will see why soon). Make sure you figure is on its own layer.

Create a new layer just for painting a background (do not use the background layer). Now fill that in with a grey like this one. Go to Menu->Filters->Render-> Lighting Effects and do something like I have done in this picture. This is creating a light source which can go anywhere really but keep in mind how you figure is lit. You can usually get away with this mind because the person is outside and there is general light from all over the place.

Digital Art Techniques - Textures

Textures can make a big difference when painting digitally because they provide detail which would be almost impossible to draw by hand. By adding simple textures you can make your paintings more interesting and give it some life which it wouldn't have normally.

Objects such as rocks
First I will show you how I use textures to create objects such as rocks without having to draw all of the cracks etc which would take a very long time otherwise.

Here we start off with a rock type shape which literally took me 30 seconds to paint using a hard brush and flow at 5% and a black colour. Make sure the rocks are on a layer of its own.  (Click on the images below to get a bigger view).

First we start with a very simple rock shape and I usually have lots of rocks all on top of each other etc. If you cannot make them up then just use a reference. Just so the rocks are not floating in mid-air I added a shadow layer to make things look a little more realistic.

Artist Watch - Boris Vallejo

I thought I would write about a few of my favorite artists and the ones who influence me the most so who better to start with than the person who made me want to paint fantasy art in the first place.

Even if you do not recognise his name you are very likely to have seen some of his paintings on book covers, films covers and advertising all over. Here is an example of some of his comercial work for the film National Lampoons European Vacation.

He mainly paints in the fantasy genre with barbarians, goblings etc but he is also a proffesional illustrator which he makes a living from. He is american and very much alive and producing work which you can see more of here.

Digital Art Techniques - Painting Skin

Probably the most difficult part of any painting is the persons skin. It is quite a complicated subject which you could probably write a book on. I am certainly not an expert at it and I try to improve every time I start a new painting.

I am going to go over what I do and perhaps it will help you out of you are trying for something similar.

I actually have two different ways of painting skin so I will explain both and you can choose which one you like the best.

Technique 1 - Starting in black and white

Digital Art Techniques - Basics

I thought I would share the way I work in parts rather than just mentioning them in my posts. It will never be comprehensive because I do things differently in most paintings but there are general techniques I use in every single one.

Any Photoshop (PS from now on) CS version will do but that is the only software I use with a Cintiq 12 tablet. It helps having a nice tablet like this but it is not essential and I used to have the Intuos as well. I would not recommend using a mouse so go get a tablet now if you don't already have one.

Supergirl

Click the Read More link to see work in progress steps.