The Curious Concepts Project: "A Skydiver" - Painted and Ready For Proofing

For the first time in, oh, about two months, I wasn't up to my eyeballs in commissions, meetings, shows, or any other work that could take priority over this project. Don't get me wrong, I need all that art/design work to keep coming in, but I really, really wanted to keep going with this project. So the break was nice.

After working on A Skydiver for several hours I noticed that I was zoomed in 400% and painting in tiny details, which is a pretty good sign that I'm reaching the end of a digital painting. Yes, I still kept working on it, and I have a good feeling that I'm going to need to make some minor changes before I send this piece out to the printer, but for now, we're calling this one finished;

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So, what has changed since the last update? Well...

First, I decided that something wasn't quite with the composition, and after sleeping on it, I figured out that there was just too much extra background space. Didn't need to be there, made it tougher to finish the composition, and after double checking the printer's size requirements I found out that my diensions were off by a half inch. I work in layers, so it was an easy fix. Added a temporary layer showing the new size and then re-sized/slide everything into its new space.

So that I didn't end up cropping out possibly still needed background painting, I created another temporary layer (the black section), so that I could see the final composition without being distracted by the extra pieces. Still sliding things around in this screenshot.

Still sliding things around here too.

This is the last round of shading on the individual skydivers. Now that the sun isn't being moved around anymore I could focus on creating a more realistic lighting effect. Had a slight problem with the black section, it was tough to gauge how dark to go with the shading with it there, so I changed it to what I like to call, "Photoshop Gray". It shows up here, but in Photoshop it looks just like the stage area of the program.

Bubbles!

Finished up the shading on the skydivers, painted in the rest of the ground, added scales to the fish, did some more work on the whale, and finally painted in the lines attaching the skydivers to their parachutes.

Cropped off the extra space, and there we have it, 

A Skydiver.

Now that it's done I will be printing it with my basic home printer so that I can proof the colors, fix any rough spots that show up in print, and adjust anything that might still need it. Then off to the professional print service it goes.

1 illustration down, 4 left to go. ^_^