Andrew Theophilopoulos – Future Cowboy – September 2011 – Tutorial
Andrew Theophilopoulos is currently working as a concept artist in Sarasota, FL. His work is primarily naturalist, focusing on the raw beauty of the human figure. He also does more contemporary work, such as concept art and character design. His dedication to the mastery of oil painting adds tremendously to his skill as a digital & concept painter.
See his work at- Theonides.blogspot.com
I started this painting completely in Photoshop using the round brush from start to finish. I have my size jitter and opacity jitter set to pen pressure and with just those two settings I go back and forth from hard to soft. This gives me a good variety of texture and edge even though I’m only using one brush.
Beginning the Rough Concept in Photoshop
I had my thumbnail and photo reference all sorted out before I started my final line drawing directly in Photoshop. My original concept was to have our hero and his noble steed gunning down some criminals. But halfway through I realized how awkward things were looking. At first glance it looked like an angry cowboy on his pretty pony, the composition was very static and overall the picture was very, very boring.
Cowboy Concept New Composition
Time to turn things around. I went back to the drawing board and tried to find some new compositions and maybe more of a mystery to the story I was trying to tell. I enjoyed the way things flowed here with this cool figure-8 composition. But even still the repeated eye motion around and around seemed slightly strenuous. I wanted more variety, which is why I chose to have one man already down. This had even more tension and put the viewer in the eyes of the blindfolded man. Letting them feel the fear of being the next one to get shot.
Tightened Cowboy Concept Layout
When you view my art up close you can see the complexity of my simple “round” brush strokes. From far away it looks rather realistic and nicely smoothed. But its not, it consists of tons of big and small strokes. I use the larger strokes for a smoother surface such as the leather jacket and the smaller more scribble like strokes in the more textured smaller shapes like the fur in the coat or the snow frosted onto their clothes. You really need to follow the direction of the form with your brush strokes when painting like this. Smooth things tend to follow the form much more than the smaller scribbles. When I begin the painting I like to fill the big shapes with a mid tone. For example since the jacked is rather dark, I will start off somewhere in between that shapes lights and darks and simply fill the shape with that solid grey value. Then I place the shadows, bring out the light tones and finish with the highlights if there are any. It’s a very classical way to work but it works just as well digitally.
I did 90 percent of the painting completely in grayscale and it’s how I start most of my conceptual paintings. My coloring process utilizes the selective color menu found under image adjustments. I will select a basic shape with the free selection lasso tool, such as all of a characters skin or his entire jacket. Once I have all of his skin selected I go to the selective color box under image adjustments, change the color drop bar to “neutrals” and turn my grey skin into a generic flesh tone by simply moving the sliders back and forth to get the right base color. Once I have a good base color I can now feather my selection tool making a variety of hard and soft transitions. For example I can feather the pixels on the face to get softer color changes such as rosy cheeks or a soft shadow color.
Almost Finished Cowboy Concept
At this point I was ready to throw in the towel. After all this work I hated the painting more than anything. The figures looked nice, they weren’t floating anymore and had just about all their finishing touches on them. Only problem now was the background. It sucked!!! All the reference in the world didn’t seem to help. It looked amateur and super busy. But with one gradient layer (going from solid white to fully transparent) whiting out the whole upper background it looked AWESOME!!! Sometimes it just takes some fidgeting to get things where they belong. The snowfall was simply a ton of random off white strokes topped off with a motion blur. I threw in a little photo texture in the snow but its barely noticeable. The final thing I added to this painting was a cooling photo filter. This tied all the colors together and made the final illustration even colder.
Finished Illustration
Cowboy Concept Close Up
