Background: I am writing a multi-chaptered story called The Breaking where one of the characters is called Aryth (pronounced Areid) Lin O?ea. These days I tend to paint some of the characters that I write. Aryth is a seaman, basically what amounts to a merman though one that can morph into human-like.
This is version 1 of the guy.

The first thing that I always do when starting a DA a part from having a vague idea of what I want is going on the net and Google for reference pics. One of the main reason to why I do that is because I? not very good at drawing free hand on the computer plus with a reference I can see where the shadows and light falls and so on.

I had before hand decided that I wanted Tom Welling to stand for Aryth, basically because I think he is gorgeous and has interesting features, he also fit somewhat of how I imagine Aryth to look like. The only thing that I needed to do now was to find one that I liked.

Haven chosen an image, I opened a new document in Photoshop with the dimension that I wanted
(1182 x 1450px) and with the resolution of 300 dpi which is what I always use. I then add the TW image and enlarge it to the size I want and on a new layer start doing the line art.

For a strange reason I always begin with the eyes. I guess it´s a remnant from the days I used to draw on paper. Like when I color, I did pupils in one layer. The irises on another, the high light on, you guessed it, another.

Once I got the eyes done I moved over to the contour of the face. On this layer I did not only do the contour of the face but also the rest of the features such as nose, mouth, eyebrows and also the body. With weaker lines I marked out where the shadows were going to fall in the fellow. Of course using the reference, never forget the reference.



My sister did a rough sketch of the body which I cleaned up rather extensively. The hair that I had originally started doing didn´t sit well with me so I asked her to do a rough sketch of the hair as well. Then with the pen tool I started doing the hair as well. The hair was the last stage that I did for the line art.





You won´t believe how many layers I had for the hair. Once I was happy with how it looked I started to merge them down. But at one point I had each braid in one layer, the lines that guided me the fall of the braid in another. The long hair at the shoulder and at the side of the head was in a couple of others as I wanted to be able to delete part of it without affecting the rest if I wasn´t happy how it was turning out and the hair at the top was in another layer. I think in total I had 11 before I merged it down.



Since the rough sketch was done in red I did the hair in white to be able to see better. Once it was finished I locked the layers and painted it a dark brown. The same way I had done the lines for the eyes, face and body. Though those line I did red instead of white.

Now to the fun part, the coloring. With this image I had a couple standard settings. The brushes was alternted between a soft round, hard round and a splatter custum brush. Flow was set to 61 and the Opacity was set between 31 - 54.

Now, once I was done with the line art and stored all the lines into one folder I grabbed the eyedropper tool and clicked on the TW image to choose what I wanted as the color base. I started to block in the color and once I was finished with that I grabbed the lasso tool and divided the face and the rest of the body so that they ended up in different layers and locked those layers so that the transparent part of the layer would remain transparent. I find it easier to define the chin if i have seperate layers.

Once I did the base for the skin, I blocked in the hair on another layer. So now I'm up to 3. I also started dooling a little on the face as Aryth is suppose to have marks on his face.

I made a new folder which I named Eyes and added 4 layers into it as I know that´s what I´ll end up with since the whites are in one. The Iris in another, the pupil and then the highlight. Exactly as with the line art.

As the eyes started to be 80% finished I began to block in the skin tones I wanted on him more often then naught picking the hues from the TW ref-image.

I started definning more and more the skin, alternating between the soft and the splatter brush. At this stage I no longer used the round hard edge brush.

In another folder which I named Marks I added a couple of more layers. Picking a hue from the skin I used the splatter brush and one by one added the round dots, alternating the sixe from 53px, 32px, 19px, 31px, 11px and 9px. That layer I sat at Color Dodge to get that contrast that I liked.

The skin markins for the rest of him, shoulder chest and face as well, I sat the layer on Soft light. The hue that I used for that custum brush was almost brown.

There are still ways to go as the hair needs to be done. Hair is not my strong point so we´ll see how that turns out. And there are some little details here and there...