Easter Postcard 2017. Sir Haresleys quest continues

Final painting

The initial sketch for the card. I made a total of 5 sketches, deciding to go with this one in the end as it fit the most as a follow up to last years card. The good thing is that I also have an idea for next year already!

The color sketch. Just painted roughly over the lines in order to find the color palette and lighting situation. I only made two of those as I already had a clear direction in mind.

In the first step I draw a clean line drawing on top of the sketch. Having a good drawing to start from helps me a lot, especially for the workflow I've chosen for this painting.

Next I use the path tool to fill the lines. Using paths has two advantages for me: 1. I can switch the base color of huge areas if needed and 2: I can quickly create masks from the shapes which saves a lot of time during the painting process.

Next I start painting into the shapes from background to foreground. Due to the paths there are only sharp edges between shapes, so I use textured brushes to break those up in the background to push it further back, creating more depht

More rendering, here I make heavy use of masks and clipping masks so I can use soft and texture brushes without breaking the shapes, especially in the foreground.

At this close to finished state I collapse all layers and paint over some of the shapes to give the painting a more natural feel. I can always go back to my saved masks if needed.