A selection of ASOIAF fanart — including an Arya, Gendry and Hot Pie sketch, plus abandoned works-in-progress for Jorah and Jory.
“Storm the walls and kill them all,” Ser Amory said in a bored voice.
Sadly for him, Arya, Gendry and HOT PIE were ready to kick knight butt:
I often see this illustration being used in merch and un-credited artworks all around the internet. Bummer!
Jory Cassel color pencils WIP
I’ve also worked on some ASoIaF landscapes and a Sansa and Sandor Clegane painting.
Jorah Mormont WIP development
STEP 1: Setting proportions right in Photoshop (they’re not quite right yet, but what I do first is to try to set them by eye only, by opening the canvas and reference side by side; and only after finishing the sketch I’ll bring the photo reference to a layer under the lineart and see what looks different.
This is a good practice to notice common drawing quirks, such as if you have a tendency to enlarge noses, shrink eyes, etc.
STEP 2: Palette building! I avoided “pure” black or white here. Shadow areas are not only darker but also highly saturated and have less contrast (which means color and value variation is subtle).
Skin transparency: Light hits skin = Blood shows through it, hence light pink being more realistic than pure white for such areas. See his left eye, there is no pure white in there. This effect is called subsurface scattering and is very noticeable when you hold a lit lamp, or position your hand between your and the sun, for instance. It happens to all objects that have some transparency.
Skin tones: Realistic skin tones have hues from red to purple or even green. In white men with dark hair, the jaw and chin area tend to have more greenish hues. This will always depend on your lighting, but it tends to happen in a few portraits because of their stubble creating small dots of color that give the impression of a grayish/greenish skin.
It is the same logic behing how CMYk printing works, with layers of small dots overlapping other layers of small dots and we perceiving new color from it.
More painting tips.
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