Title: "The Tenth Doctor" (David Tennant)
Medium: Photoshop
Size: 10" x 10" / 3000px x 3000px
Client: Self-promotion
Hours: 12.25
This is the Tenth Doctor as played by David Tennant (oh, Tennant, why have you left us?!)

Sourced from a publicity photo (© BBC Photographer, unknown), this piece was started as a speed-painting, but as I blew into the fifth hour, I decided that ship had sailed. I endeavored to avoid the eye-dropper tool and any other novelty tool not normally found in the traditional artist's toolbox. It actually helped quite a bit. I'm not usually one to shy away from helpful tools, but as I have not actually painted anything in a few months, I needed to start at the ground again.
 

Interested parties may view the follow-along 'tutorial' is also on my Blogger.

Tools:
• Photoshop (CS3)
• Wacom Tablet (Intuos 3, 12 x 10")

Stage 1: The Drawing

This entire piece is being created digitally via Photoshop. Going into it, I've already decided that I want this piece to be as basic as possible. I am not going to use any 'special' tools in its creation, i.e., The Clone Stamp, Eye-Dropper, or Layer Effects. Essentially, if it isn't a tool I could readily pull from a traditional painting kit, I don't want to use it. (I can attribute this nuance to Zachary Wojnar, a student of mine from several semesters ago whom argued against these tools for their retarding of the learning process. After all was said, I have to agree with him).

So during the drawing, I follow all of the normal rules of engagement — anatomy, perspective, mass and volume, foreshortening, etc. Since this piece is about as straight-forward as it gets (and I had very clean reference) the drawing took me less than 30 minutes. I spent about 20 of those minutes on the face, which is clearly critical. My biggest rule (belief) is that the drawing should supersede the painting for importance. If you have 5 hours to work on a painting and you're not very confident it's going to come out well, spend 3 of those hours getting the drawing right. Hell, spend 4. An extremely well-painted, bad drawing is still a bad drawing and it will hurt you. I'd rather the drawing be strong and the painting be sparse.

Personally speaking, this drawing is not that well done. The lines are all loose with very little 'road map' from which to paint. There is no tonal build at all, and no identifiable light source. All of these things lacking however, I have in my reference. So as long as I use the reference religiously, I do not need to incorporate those items into the drawing. For the record, this is a very straight-forward portrait study, so the complications are minimal.

Starting on a mildly toned canvas, I begin the drawing using a standard Photoshop Spatter brush (Brushes > Spatter 27 px). The only modification I made to this brush was to turn on the Shape Dynamics feature (Window > Brushes > Shape Dynamics check box). This allows the brush to respond to the pressure sensitivities of my Wacom Tablet. Although I frequently change the size of my brush, I will use this same brush for the entire painting. I have chosen this particular brush because I tend (when painting traditionally) to favor Oils and Acrylics, and often employ a dry-brush technique which can leave noticeable bristle marks when painting. Hence, the Spatter brush and its noticeable, loose 'bristles'. Also, and this is very important, I almost never use the brush at 100% Opacity. I try to keep the opacity level down between 70% and 90%. This is just low enough that it doesn't affect the pigment I'm painting with too much, but more importantly applies a somewhat transluscent application of paint. In other words, you can see through the strokes. This will drive you a little crazy in the beginning if you're approaching the painting like a coloring-book and you want to fill in all the spaces, but the idea is to allow your pigments to build organically. Applying color with 100% opacity and therefore 100% color saturation is unnatural and immediately screams it's digital. So to this end, keep your brush opacity down. Even 95% is better than 100%.

I have the reference photo of Tennant on my other monitor. (Photographer unknown. Presumed © BBC).

Artwork ©2012 Brian Kotulis.

Stage 2: Color Blocking

Before I begin painting, I immediately create a new Layer because I don't want to lose my roadcmap by painting over it or otherwise ruining it. For good measure, I also make a copy of this drawing layer and hide it just in case I mistakenly paint onto the drawing. I'm a fairly paranoid artist, so I like to have back-ups. Also to this point, this would be a great time to Save your work (and save often. Every 15 minutes, if you can).

Normally at this stage one should tone the entire canvas with a base color that would serve as the ambient, common color for the whole piece. This would then serve as the beginning of the background. Since this piece was meant as a speed-painting, and the reference image had no background, I was going to ignore the background altogether.

Because I'm being lazy.

And a hypocrite.
 
Once I have a drawing that I feel comfortable with, I begin blocking in the colors, beginning with a solid and rather intentionally-messy common-color outline. I basically retraced all of the important contours with a deep-brown. I am paying virtually no attention to specific details or cleanliness of my line work, with some exceptions to line weights. Part of painting, for me, is maintaining a degree of accidental creation — which mostly disappears in a digital painting.

Digital painting tends to look very clinical and 'computer generated' which is why the stigma against it exists. It's too easy to use the Undo button, sample colors, or make super-clean lines or shapes. The goal in painting, I believe, is to allow the human element to come through. That is to say, stop undoing every mistake, stop zooming in to 1000% to finesse details, and stop using the Eye-dropper which only hurts my ability to see and understand color. But most importantly, painting digitally means I have to control my palette. It's far too easy to use all 128 million RGB colors, and most digital paintings go wrong because of this. Keep your palette as simple as possible for as long as possible. As you can see from my swatches above, I kept this painting to 4 base colors: Umber (brown) Pthalo Green, Sienna (light brown), and a hand-sampled light periwinkle (blue-purple). The grey-blue became my fifth color after blocking the head was complete.

I've used the periwinkle color for all of the shadows on David's face; you can still see it peeking out in the contours, along the hairline and in the eyes. The reason for this dramatic color choice is simple. Skin is not made of plastic, or rock, or wood, or metal. Skin is organic. Skin is also mostly transluscent, which is to say that light goes through it. The lighter the complexion, the more light will bounce through it. I say 'bounce' because that what the periwinkle is representing — the sub-layers of the skin. Skin is full of subcutaneous layers of skin and blood; the light passes through the skin and bounces back out reflecting the colors within. Building up the base-colors here is critical. Without it you would have a surface that feels very plastic or doughy.

During this critical step of color selection, I predefine all of the other shadow areas. I look at the reference photo and mentally isolate all of the darkest darks (shadows, etc) and block them all in. Since these darks should be the darkest colors on the canvas, it immediately sets up my road map both for light source and for hue selection; the painting can only get brighter from here. Since I have reference, this goes quickly. I make sure all of the shadows are locked in at their maximum depths of tone. Never use black. Black (and white) virtually have no place in painting. All shadows (and all highlights) have some color to them, even if its subtle. This little difference goes a long way. Instead, I use a dark umber. For his jacket, I went back over the umber with the grey-blue. As I mentioned earlier, do no erase-out old colors when repainting something, simply paint over it. This will maintain that authentic build-up of color as you would in a traditional painting.
During the physical painting process, I make every stroke follow the form of the item I'm painting. By doing this, it adds immense believability of texture to the final piece. These strokes are most evident in the jacket. I've also left some very noticeable gaps between the strokes — this is done intentionally. Again, this allows for a more authentic paint texture and experience.

Stage 3: Building Something.

Once all of my areas are painted in with their base-tones. At this point, I've already hit about 3 or 4 hours. I'm quickly realizing that my 'speed-painting' has officially become just 'a painting', so I am now taking more time to do things right and enjoy myself. I continue building the color up in the face specifically, and filling in the jacket and clothing. From experience I know that hair is a special challenge that requires its own techniques and style. Since hair is such a different creature form the rest of the painting, I'm ignoring it for a bit longer.

I've added a true sienna mixture to the facial tones which is appearing a bit orange here, and I will need to tone that back down. However as I am only working in the mid tones right now, I can cool the face off when I add on the final layers of pigment, defining the highlights. I'm also noticing, by way of comparing against my reference shot, that the blue of his jacket is both too blue and too similar in tone to the shadows. I will need to correct this. But as these layers serve as my base painting, I have time to correct it. These 'poor' color choices will only benefit the richness of the painting later. Thus, I blaze on...

Stage 4: I'm a Hypocrite

So now that I've officially entered hour 5, any speediness of this self-inflicted 'speed painting' has long diminished. Time to bite the bullet and realize that I need to bring back the background before it's too late. Fact is, it's already too late. By adding a loosely streaked umber background (using the umber I'd already pre-chosen for David's hair) I create an immediate problem of contrast. The only thing popping now is his face (which is a good problem, as far a problems go), but it undermines the rest of the painting I just spent 5+ hours on, and also completely hides his hair, which creates a weird pointed-head effect.

So why didn't I just leave it white? Well leaving it white is what amateurs do. And I want a painting I'm proud of. Also, leaving it white automatically makes all of the colors seem cooler in temperature, which is hurting the painting and negatively affecting my color choices, which is why the face became to orange — I'm subconsciously trying to warm it up, to the point I've overshot.

So why not choose a different color? Choosing a different color presents a totally opposite problem. First, the palette should be kept minimal for the greatest chance at believability. And since the background/light source determines all of my color choices, it would be a huge problem to swith that critical item to something else. It would be like building a stack of blocks and then deciding that the bottom block should be a marble; I'm sure it can be done, but it will be really hard to make work. The background color is your base block; it's what the whole painting is founded on. Changing that out for a totally different color would need to ripple through all of your succeeding color choices and is no easy task, even if you're a master at Photoshop's Color-Balance/Replacement features. And lastly, using Photoshops's color-balancing features is exactly the kind of digital trickery I am trying to avoid — I couldn't do that in an oil painting. I want to paint, not artificially retouch.

So now that the umber is in place as the background, I have some repair work to do. I've applied another few hits of the periwinkle to cool David's face off, removing the orange cast. I also re-apply some umber to the shadows and spend some time on the eyes and fine details, assuring that the facial features match the reference.

Stage 5: Failure Rising, Thwarted

Although the background is meant to be dark, it is not meant to be darker than the shadows on David. Thus I have to reassess these tones and colors. I was already feeling that the color of his jacket was too purple-grey and the tone too light, so now I will address these issues. I've modified the shadows by repainting them with a much deeper midnight blue that complimented the brown of the umber. I then repainted all of the middle-tones with a lighter hue of that blue which filled in all of the gaps I left behind with the original coat.

I've spent a little more time on his face and hair, adding some minor details. For these areas, I've reduce my brush size to less than half its size and turned the opacity up to 80-90%. Outlining the eyes and hair strands should be fairly hard-edged and precise; far more-so than the primary painting. Be careful how hard-edged and how fine-tipped you get, because these are clear give away that the piece is digital. They also risk making the piece feel heavily stylized and cartoon-y. A certain degree of natural blur is expected and appreciated.

Also. facial hair. I often like to paint every strand of facial hair, but in this case its more stubble than hair. I accomplish this simply by taking my same Spatter brush and increase its size to something large enough that one hit with the brush will fill a significant part of the beard area. I then decrease the brush opacity to 10% or less. Rather than drag the brush across the surface, just dab the brush onto the painting like you would if sponging. This should be done very subtly. If it's too strong, the brush edges will be too obvious and appear fake.

Stage 6: Pretty much there.

To my previous point about edges being too precise or hard-edged, I was noticing that David's eyes were falling into this problem. The outlining and hard contours were feeling like pen outlines and like he had on mascara. To fix this, I simply pushed them back by carving into the lines with the hues of the surrounding colors. This helped to thin out the lines and adjusted the color to appear more natural. Eyes (and critical details) tend to be the areas where I tread a very fine line on breaking my rule on being too precise and zooming in too far. It's a struggle to not go overboard with linework, and just let the colors do the talking.

I haven't addressed hair yet. Well here goes:

Hair is a tricky feature. But it can be broken down fairly easily. As you saw in my original drawing (Stage 1), the hair is drawn solely as a texture. Meaning, don't draw it like shape. Lines should not be connecting to form any kind of a container. Most artists will draw various forms of enclosed shapes to identify the form of the hair, but hair is not a ball or a cube or amorphous blob. Hair is billions of long tubes. That hair may all sit in pile that looks like a ball or a cube or amorphous blob, but it cannot be drawn this way. Instead, it must be textured this way. Since David's hair is styled very simply this example should be pretty basic — Again, I reference my Stage 1 drawing: you can see the loose line work of the skull beneath the hair (the sphere) that the hair sits on. Like a wet rag, the hair sits on this sphere and thus conforms to its shape. The part in his hair is fairly obvious, and serves as the origin of the hair follicle texture. Simply make several key lines that start at this point of origin (the part) and travels across the sphere of this head to create the beginning of the hair texture. Since I have reference, this is as simple as following what I see. But it would be no different if doing this from scratch. These lines, once all in place, will define the amorphous blob that is the 'shape' of David's hair. The key lines I mentioned are exactly that — lines that serve as road maps for his hair. These lines are nothing more than the strongest lines that help indicate the direction of the hair. The next steps would then be to fill in all of the individual strands (in varying levels of detail) between these key strands to fully define the texture. To keep things realistic, mess some of them up; go in different directions, cross over other strands, etc. If every strand is perfect, it will look extremely fake. Hair is never perfect down to the last strand.

Once the head of hair has been filled in, I'll then go back in to selectively define the highlight areas. This is governed by the reference, of course. Adding different, subtle colors and tones to the strands also gives the hair texture depth and believability as a "volume" of hair, and not as a "sheet" of hair. If your hair tends to feel like a mat draped over the head, it simply needs more definition. Try adding multiple levels of different tones to your strands.

Yes, hair is very different than other items and can often take longer than the face itself. Toldjaso.

Similarly to the hair, I also added pin-striping to his suite. This aids not only in spicing up the suit, but make the overall cloth feel more believable. The lines were painted slowly down the full length of the fabric, all of them shaped to emulate the surface of the cloth. Every little bump, ripple and crease in the fabric only further solifies its believability.

The Doctor is a very hands-on character. He often get dirty and thus his suit needed some soot and dust. Although he's dressed in Dolce & Gabbana, the dirt makes the clothing choice appear more eccentric and less practical. This is not a fashion statement so much as just body wrapping. He'd wear it to a social gathering or crawling around under the Tardis Control Counsel fixing the vortex field.

Stage 7: I AM A DALEKKKK

Up 'til now I've all ignored the background (which is a general image making no-no). Without a real plan of attack, I know all along that the background will be simple. Using the obvious choice of the Doctor's Tardis, I indicate a few of the wall mounts that symbolically represent the Tardis interior. The lasts steps for me here were hitting the image with subtle and simple lines and details wherever I felt it was necessary to match the reference. In the end, I feel this was a fun piece.