MONKEY KING PAINTING - Step by step tutorial

[the black frog]

Ok, ok, ok... just because you're nice... and also errr, because I've been spending much more time cheking in at the forum than actually doing anything productive for the past 4 days (feel kind of bad) here's the one of the evening. You want a step by step, there ya go:

step 1 - color splashes on a painter canvas - at that point I have no idea what I am about to do.



Step 2 - Oh yeah I could do a monkey king picture that'd be sweet I've alway wanted to have a crack at it... so I block out a monkey head right!. I replace the background thinking that the subject is chinese let's make it china red and see how it goes from there.


Step 3 - the figure is a bit boring so lets try to make it a bit more dynamic by adding some flying-in-the-wing-shit around...The character in the book is supposed to wear some tiger skin so there, that would do great...


Step 4 - Ok, that is still a bit static so I'm adding an arm in the air and show his left hand (more dynamic still)... this guy is supposed to be a very fighsty(?sorry I tend to get more and more french these days). it's making the composition diagonal for the better.
I'm making him look at us for more involvement of the audience. he drags you in the picture by looking at you.


step5 - Dude?! I say to myself isn't the monkey king all about his heavenly staff... you know the weapon he seems to wip out of his hear any time he has to show a careless god what old brother monkey is made of?
So draw a staff in the picture!... Kind of important artifact for the character so I put it well in evidence. I work the face a bit more and accentuate the tiger scarf - always one thought in mind: is it ELEGANT????? - if not work it until it gets there.


step 6 - All right I'm kind of happy with that... kind of... I didn't solve the hand in the front but they don't have to know that - wait, did I write that outloud crap! - me and my big mouth. Anyway the picture works like that so I can sort of be lazy for once. So now I put a dark wash of watercolor around the picture to center the focus of attention on the face of the monkey king.


step 7 - I bring the painting from painter to photoshop and modify the brightness and contrast of the picture to get more humpf.
I get it back to painter once that's done to make the final little touches and details and when I am done with that I bring it back one last time under photoshop to Put 'MONKEY KING' in japonese - thank for Maiko my japanese girlfriend what would I do without you? - and the little black frog that I like so much. There, done! Not quiet printing material - I would have to put a bit more work into it than that - didn't use any ref' I kinda wing it - but for a step by step it should do.


First step by step ever, hope you liked it.
Now that you know all of my tricks I'm dead meat.BEUUAAAH

You might want to plan ahead and draw some thumbnails for composition and stuff though.

The other thing to keep in mind... when you work on something for more than an hour when you think it's ok take a brake... 1 sometimes two days afterward you see tons of mistakes in it and you want to throw yourself out of the window...

that happens to me all the time...

So just be cool, take the time to go back at it to check... that's the way it is, you have to go through the process.
If 2 days after, you're still satisfied with your doodle, then send it for print.

[scottg]

Awesome work! Thanks for the step by step as well. Very insightful.

[JoshuaTheJames]

Hehe. NIce!


thanks for sharring,

-Joshua James

[NoUseFrAName]

very cool. Thanks especially for writing down your thought process along with the images...that makes such a huge difference in making sense of things when people post step by step images.

rock on Frog man!

-Rob

[el coro]

damn frog! dats some mighty nice painting! now i know all your secrets! black frog status here i come!!! seriuosly tho dood, awesome tutorial. the commentary is very insightful and hilarious as well. keep on rokkin man. we are all very happy to have you around here-c36

[wes9000]

that was great!

thanks for posting it


-wes

[Floris Didden]

Very cool. Thanks muchos for sharing that.

[diffuser]

very nice step-by-step indeed. thanks for sharing!

[bosquejo]

superb
i'll try to learn something from here.
thanks for your time.

[nicolas]

Hot Dawg!
Damn, Man....You make it look so easy! Thank you very much for sharing!
Hopefully this'll be the first of many tutorials from you......'keeping fingers crossed'

Great work,

cheers,

NIC

[the black frog]

2 days latter... what could make it better:

http://forums.conceptart.org/showthread.php?t=35215

[steak-tron]

thanks for the tutorial

hehe it's funny how the forum does that. It both inspires you and drains your time because you get sucked into looking at all the cool art. Still a good thing tho

[JoshuaTheJames]

bump!!!

[Skelepimp]

This is so great!

I feel like hugging myself!!

(Awwwwww....Rggghhh! Hey, let go! You freak!!)

....ughh,,,sorry about that. Thanks, for this! Very helpful!

[Flipnastywebby]

very energetic and inspiring
really gets you to want to start painting right after you read through it.

you ever think about teaching as a side job.
i feel like you could really get a class of students going with your energy


slainte! great stuff

[FlyingMilton]

That's one hell of a powerbump. 2 years has to be a record somewhere.

Great tutorial. It really helped me a few years back when I first started out with my tablet.

[ICH]

Nice painting and really intresting process, Frog. Thanks a lot for becoming dead meat for us ;-]
About the graphics: your logotype under the red script is almost invisible, at least on my CRT monitor.
The japanese type it's strongly sharp and regular, and that's fine on purpose to use old asian movie's mood, but I think that you need some other elements...perhaps just your logo visible can works.
If you want to use a different mood on your future works, I try to give you a humble suggestion. I got a japanese friend and we have do some pretty stuff in this way: she write some kanji whit brush on paper, I scan and play whit levels, contrast and more, than I vectorialize whit tools like Flash or CorelTrace and finally optimize working directly on beziers nodes. This can give you a unique style and a versatile vector object.
Just my two cents.

Edit: Also using a small point marker on a little permeable paper to draw really little little kanji works really well, if you scan at huge resolution (4 mm kanji scanned at 1600 dpi works really fine, but you need to work a little on edge sharpening).

[thundercake]

I like that you don't know what you're about to do when you draw. I do that too sometones, though I usually think to myself "this is a bad habit, I should plan more!" xP I love your monkey king.

[ticktac]

outstanding work. i love monkeys, and any art related to monkeys. The step-by-step was a nice way to show your style.

[dkounios]

thank you for sharing Black.
a very helpful tut, no doubt!

[kyletwebster]

This is lovely, but I'd love to know which brushes were used! Would you mind sharing this info? Many thanks! -Kyle

[ikuru]

love ur monkey kings dude.