Once the layout is approved, I’m ready to finish the drawing. Here you can see the perspective grid I placed on a separate layer to guide my castle’s construction. I didn’t have it this prominent as I was drawing, but ghosted back as a guide — it’s intensified here so you can see it. There are no straight lines in the horizontal plane of this grid except for one major axis along the front of the parapet wall; they’re all subtly curved. That’s because I wanted to feel as if we were floating just above Drizzt — that required a close vantage. In order to sell that, the rest of the view had to be ever-so-slightly fish-eyed (that’s the way things look in the real world, by the way; you can see it from where you sit if you turn your head and study the parallel lines where the wall meets the floor and ceiling. Or stand in the middle of a straight road and look in both directions: how can those two perfectly straight lines meet on either horizon?)
With all the elements in place, I first convert the grayscale drawing to colored “underpainting” in Photoshop, using a combination of brushes set in the “color” mode, Color Balance, and other tools. Then I take it back into Painter for most of the rest of its transition, beginning with transparent Digital Water “glazes” in Corel. The Digital Water brushes are intuitive and very useful for blocking in big areas of color. My first task was to distinguish the warm and cool areas from each other. This “underpainting” would show through everything that followed to one degree or another. When painting traditionally, in oils, this would be an acrylic layer, perhaps in brighter colors than I used here:
Then I’m ready to start detailing, beginning, usually, with the most distant parts of the environment:
The process for me is to continue to build up color with glazes, then pop the highlights with opaque color when everything else is resolved. I worked the same way in oils: transparent darks, rich opaque highlights:
Since publication, I decided that I should go back and brighten the picture, even though it was too late to salvage some horrendous printing on the actual book (Wizards contracted a new printer, I am told … see what you get when you go cheap?)
Image © Wizards of the Coast. Text © Todd Lockwood
Next up: Details of Drizzt
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