Alien Paintings

Well I had the day off from work today which means I actually get to paint! I've been playing Mass Effect recently and I've been inspired to some space sci-fi stuff also I thought I would show a little bit of my process.





The first thing I like to do is start out with a drawing. I love to draw and that's usually where I come up with a lot of my better ideas. 

I like to do a rough paintover on the creature without any armor on so that I can start getting a grasp on what colors I'm going to use. This species evolved on a dark planet without much natural sunlight and thus has a dark blue skin tone. I put a splash of violet on the blue skin as that makes it look a little more alive. When painting human skin adding red to the skin makes it look more alive and healthy because there is blood flowing under there. With my alien I used that same logic, only there blood is purple rather than red.

After I do a rough paintover on the naked body I then design my armor. I try to make the armor colors unify with the creatures skin and I feel that was fairly successful.

 Once I have my base tones down I usually do light  Gaussian blur and throw a quick gradient on a separate layer with a layer effect In this design I used soft light. This gives me a rough starting point on where to take my lighting. 

With my lighting roughly started I collapse everything down and then begin painting in highlights and shadow and start painting the image with the lighting in mind. While it's not quite done yet, it's close.  theres still work to be done on the feet and hands. and then just some polish on the background.