- Winged Vamp Tutorial -
Or how to achieve a more or less natural media oil/acrylic painting look with digital media by Uwe Jarling.

This tutorial shows how I work to achieve a more traditional media look with my digital paintings. The tutorial shows how I work using Painter and Photoshop to achieve this goal. I’m not sure if it will work using Photoshop alone as Photoshop does not offer the brushed and possibilities like Painter does, what does not necessarily mean you can’t achieve such results using Photoshop alone, it does only mean I am not able to achieve it using Photoshop alone :-). To make a long sentence short, this tutorial shows the way I work with Painter, I only use Photoshop for color corrections and sharpening. Sharpening will be most important at the end as it actually gives the picture the “right feel”, but more later. Now let’s start.
1 – Brush selection in Painter


As you can see in the image I only use 3 brushes and one blender for this picture.
The brushes are:

1 – from the watercolor palette a slightly modified dry bristle (set the dry rate to around 20). We will use this brush for glazes in smaller areas.

2 – from the acrylics palette the dry brush, you can use as well the bristle oils brush from the oils palette, both do almost the same when you set bleed and resat to the same. Set the feature setting always to a number that you clearly can see the structure of the brush, just look at the example picture. Those brushes will be our opaque color brushes.

3 – The diffuse water brush from the digital watercolor palette. We will use this brush for glazes for big areas.

4 – last but not least we need a blender. Usually I use the grainy water blender, but I found that the coarse oily blender does the trick here for the result I’m aiming for. So let’s use the coarse oily blender here.

Oh, and of course, for the sketch I use the 2B pencil from the pencil palette ;-)
2 – The sketch


Well, usually I use this technique to achieve “natural oil painting looking” portraits, but for this tutorial I choose a fantasy theme, as fantasy art is what I love the most :-). I want to do something simple for the tutorial so I decided to do just a character with not much background. As you can see it is a kind of a Vampire with bat like wings. The sketch isn’t much detailed but it will work pretty fine for the tutorial.
If you want to follow the tutorial you can draw whatever you want of course, but the simpler the better.
Tools used here, just the 2Bpencil tool and the eraser.
3 – Starting the underpainting


Here I start the underpainting and throw in some first shades and decide where the light is coming from.
To do this I duplicate the canvas where my sketch is currently on and name the new layer sketch layer. Than clear the canvas so that it is all white again. Now take the sketch layer which now lays over the canvas and set it to multiply. This way I can start to paint on the Canvas which lies under the sketch layer, this way I don’t paint over my sketch and I always can see my sketch.
The tools I use here are the dry brush from the acrylic palette and the coarse oily blender.
Don’t care about details or if the color is in the sketch lines, just try to work out slowly some volume of the figure.
4 – Continuing the underpainting


So this is the most fun step where you can go completely wild with colors. Just try to work out the basic colors and the light direction. Use opaque and transparent colors as you like and blend like crazy to push the color around. Try as well to get as much structure and texture as possible, The sketchlayer is still on multiply so you cant destroy anything. This is the point where you can get a feeling for the picture, just “feel” your way into the image.
As for the tools, here I used every mentioned brush worked opaque and in glazes on and off.
5 – Continuing the underpainting


Just a little more refinement and still the sketchlayer separate on multiply. Slowly the painting goes in the direction I want it to. That the point where I have to make the decision if I drop the sketch layer to the canvas or if I work a little more on the underpainting.
6 – Starting to paint


Ok here I dropped the sketch layer to the canvas. This is the point where my opaque colors slowly start to hide the sketch lines. From now on it is just refining the painting more and more, the big decisions are done. We now have the color palette for the piece, a light direction and a overall composition.
Now we can start to work on the piece.
7 – Painting


Now I start to concentrate more and more on the main figure, as the background is almost done. I still don’t care about detail too much just try to work out the shapes.
8 – Painting


Well as you can see the figure is almost done, but the piece is still pretty lifeless, very static.
9 – Painting and refining the figure


Here I add a little more dramatic or interesting light to the figure and the overall picture. I also changed the wings a little. So as you see all I do now is adding more and more detail and work the things out.
10 – Still Painting


Well as she is a vampire I ned to add some blood here and there and I decided to give her some strange tattoos. So now we have a nice Vamp sitting on a rock.
But what the tutorial is about is not to paint a Vampire it is about how to achieve a natural media look. As you see the piece now looks very smooth, I tried to get as much textur in as I could using the brushes I mentioned, but the more you work on a picture the more the brush structure get invisible. And we want to have struckture and texture in the painting to make it look dirty and imperfect like natural media. Next step will show you how I do this.
11 – Bringing the structure/texture out in Photoshop


Now we want to bring out the structure that we applied using those brushes. The problem with our brushstrokes is that they got smoother and smoother the more we worked on the painting, so a simple trick to bring them back again is to take your image into Photoshop and use Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter.

Use the Unsharp Mask AND DON’T BE SHY!
Best is to duplicate the canvas and sharpen the duplicate, so you always have the original and don’t destroy it. Stop sharpening shortly before those strange artifacts appear (you’ll see what I mean when you overdid the sharpening process), just play with the amount, radius, threshold options till you get a satisfying result.
I mostly do two duplicate layers of the canvas and sharpen one a little less than the other. Than I put the less sharpened layer over the heavy sharpened layer and erase the parts where I think they need to be more sharp. While erasing the heave sharpened layer shows through and the parts are more sharp. This way you have good control over the sharpening process.
Manly I leave the figures less sharp and parts of the background heavy sharp so that the color almost look impasto.

Now if you compare this image to image 10 you’ll see the difference.
12 – Back in Painter


Back in Painter I apply more detail where I think it is needed. I could have stopped at the last step but somehow I think the piece needs a little more work. Which causes that the sharpness gets more and more lost again on several places.
13 – Final strokes


Here I decided to do an overall yellow wash to get more intense colors and I worked out the contrast more to achieve a little more interesting light in the scene. As you can see most of the sharpness is gone again, so all we need to do now is to go back into Photoshop.
14 – Final work in Photoshop


Back in Photoshop we bring out the sharpness again as mentioned before in step 11. Maybe some last color corrections if needed (here I didn’t do much color correction as I thought it look good that way).
And voila, we are done and have a nice dirty rough looking painting.
So all you need are some brushes that give some brush texture and a sharpening filter that brings out all the brush texture which you applied while painting.


15 – Some close ups and final thoughts


Here you can see some close ups at almost the original working size. Looking at the close ups you can see the real amount of texture and structure that you can achieve using this technique. Amazing isn’t it :-).
I probably overdid it a little in this picture but as it was for the tutorial purpose I thought better more than less so that it gets really visible what I’m talking about :-).
Hope this tutorial was any helpful and you had some fun reading and looking at it.
Thanks for your interest and never stop creating your dreams.


Here you can see the finished piece at a little higher resolution:



Here you can have a look at a horror-, nature- and portrait-painting I used this technique for, just so you see the technique is not limited to only fantasy art :-).
Just click on the thumbs to view the images big size:

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Any feedback is much appreciated, so don’t hesitate to drop me a mail.

Best whishes and happy painting
-Uwe