I've been on a pretty serious Warhammer 40,000 kick for the last few weeks. I've been using my various ideas and free time largely as fodder for practice with digital painting techniques. I've been trying to familiarize myself with the "start with a bunch of dark blobs, and refine it from there" method of digital painting. I started with this one...
...which turned out rather well, and prompted me to continue experimenting with digital painting techniques. This one was followed up by a couple of quicker, rougher sketches: A Space Marine helmet painted in the Ultramarines' colors, and an irate Ork.
Each of those took maybe a half hour to paint. I'm particularly happy with the Ork.
The most recent of my fully digital paintings is a portrait of one of my "Stonehides" Chaper Space Marines:
This pretty well typifies the sort of dark, painterly look that I'll be trying for with most of my other WH40k character portraits.
Last up is another image of that first character (one of my original characters, Inquisitor Acolyte Scarlet Winter). This one is somewhat more my traditional style, having been originally sketched in pencil. I then scanned it and layed down the base colors (charcoal gray, dark metallic brown, very pale skin tone) in Photoshop. The rest of the coloring and shading was done in MyPaint, the program I used to paint all of the above images.
With this one, I wasn't so much going for a "dark, painterly look" like my Space Marine above, but rather focusing on the interplay between light and dark tones in the image.
So yeah, I've had WH40k on the brain for a while. On the plus side, as long as I'm doing 40k themed stuff, I can file playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine under "research." It's a win-win!
Cheers, all.
