Departure Within – Digital Painting – work in progress session 1

Last Updated on September 2, 2016 by Patrick

Howdy y’all! It’s been a while since my last post in this section. I’ve been busy of late and I’m proud to announce that my newest digital painting is approaching its finalization.

Still, it’s a work in progress, but I’ve come very far with it and I am very glad to share it with you all.

Let me explain what I did in my first installment. I had a few ideas about an environment within the entrails of the earth (inner earth actually). It is about a place deep sank within the earth, full of wonders, with lots of strong elements, like a cave but rather like an old, sunken, petrified forest. The marvel of it is that it contains a mysterious atmosphere. The viewer is intrigued by the background lights which are all over the place giving the environment life. At first, there is no life there, no creatures lurking in and about, and the place is actually empty.. sort of.

I’ve painted the color blocks and established depths by colors and contrasts.

Then, I went on to add a bit more details in order to establish new ideas. Changed the background lights a little bit and made them a bit more punchy.

After this, I continued to bring more life into the scene using stronger contrasted elements and clearer hand-painted textures. I sacrificed the evident depth in order to arrange the scene for further details and ideas.

The problem is that I didn’t know from the very beginning what I wanted to do with this one. I knew, instead, that I wanted to depict a scene in which to suggest the inner journey within. But I didn’t quite know what to use for this story.

Then it came to me: I needed some sort of a spaceship but I needed it to be fit for exploring within the earth. But how to do this? I had two options: I either made it light and thin to its elements or heavy and sturdy. I went with the first option. I had a few ideas but didn’t work out from their very sketches. What can I say? It’s the first time for me painting a spaceship digitally.

I also had another problem. I didn’t want to make it resembling any man-made imagined and drawn or painted spaceship such as those which use fossil fuel. I needed a spaceship without any fossil fuel whatsoever. And therefore, its geometry has to be very different. I had no luck so far depicting any as such.

In the meantime, I thought about improving the environment as well. I thought that these entrails have to have lots of values within in forms of precious stones glittering here and there and so on. Thus, I started painting some crystals. This was the first idea about this subject matter.

I continued with the ideas from the previous installment and further improved the environment adding more light and more interest to the scene for the viewer. Unfortunately I started losing some depth and added more contrast along the way. Nevertheless, I enriched it with more precious stones and textures. I’m working on it to make it very realistic but still, it will be a painting.. a digital painting.

Again, I thought about adding some spaceships in this environment and so I did. I had few more ideas and added them to the scene. On the right you see a larger explorer spaceship which came out pretty well. But of course, I gave up on it and deleted it alltogether because it didn’t look as realistic and believable as I wanted it to be. The other spaceships looked just about the same in terms of style of painting. I need something else.. something original. I’ll keep exploring these ideas…

As you can see, the ship on the right looks like an underwater explorer ship. It looks sturdy and powerful for exploring beneath the earth but I’m still not satisfied. It has some aspects that make it unattractive to me.

In my last installment I removed the spaceship as promised and added new elements to the overall scene. I continued to sketch more ideas of spaceships but I decided not to add any to the scene just yet, until I’m very satisfied with my results.

I keep looking at the sturdy and huge karstic columns on the right. I don’t know what else to do there. I thought once about painting some structures.. kind of man-made structures and such, but I have no ideas just yet. I’ll explore them as well. I’ll see what I will come up with. ;)

In the meantime, I think I will add some more foreground elements like you see there, in order to recover the lost overall depth to the scene and make it more interesting and explorable for the viewer.

See ya next time! ;)

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