I am back with another episode of:
“IDontHaveAUse writes about his own art because he has nothing better to do”
Today I’ll be talking about my recent headless horseman artwork which is a remake of the same thing I made a year ago because I wanted to see if I improved at all, here’s the original artwork made last year:
My plan was to basically make the same thing with no major changes so I got to work and started out with rendering the character
The render itself didn’t take that long to make, import a character and pose in a similar way to the old one, set up an HDRI and render!
Then I went ahead and started working on a paintover of the render, since I don’t rely on rendering that much I had a lot of work to do in photoshop. Mainly it was just clean up but I did add some new elements.
Heres the before and after of the paintover, as I said I cleaned up the shading and edited the lighting, I made the metal parts of the character way shinier too, I also tried using more colors on the paintover, some greens and blues were added.
Since the renders paintover was basically done I started working on the background, it was a pretty simple dead forest scene with some pumpkins.
At first I wanted to try out drawing one tree to see if I could match the style of the character, I think it worked out pretty well. Heres a quick guide on how I draw dead trees:
I Started out sketching the rest of the background, used a stock photo to get a quick background in. for the pumpkin next to the tree I cut out the pumpkin from the character render and drew over it to make it look like it wasn’t carved, some edits to the lighting and it looked like it fit right in.
Kept it loose and drew in some grass and trees in the background as well as a little test fire effect for the pumpkin.
Added some fog in the background and to save time I tend to copy elements of my thumbnails and paste them elsewhere and manipulate them so they look different, thats what I did with the tree on the right after some extra drawing to clean it up it doesn’t look like the first tree at all!
More clean up with the background, added some foreground elements too, for the grass I tend to make it the most detailed around other objects, like the tree roots or the pumpkin and leave the rest of it less detailed.
Now that I was happy with the background I added the fire effect back! The way I make fire is by drawing a flowy shape using an orange round brush and erasing parts of it then I change the layer blending mode to color dodge and duplicate it, the layers start stacking and you get a nice fire effect like in this artwork, I also add some glows using a smooth brush and the orange color on the screen blending mode. Heres a quick guide on how I draw fire:
Some color adjustments later, I decided to make the background blue because our character here is mainly using warm colors, putting some cool ones in the back will help him pop out, I also made the rims close to the fire way brighter.
And heres the final artwork! I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I think there has been an overall improvement in my work.
As always I’m open to any questions and I’d love to help anyone out if they have a question about how I made something in this, I’m open to constructive critique as well!
If you’d like to see my other art consider following me on twitter 
Thanks for reading! I hope I’ll get to make more of these in the future! 
) if I ever need some done.
