Behind the Scenes: "Fossegrim" Layer Breakdown

For this image I ended up going with a slightly different method than I normally do. I had originally intended something similar to my "Springs" image (building it up out of a base color in a manner more similar to traditional painting), but instead I ended up working largely in blue tinted black and white and then adding color after the tonal ranges had been established. It's similar to the way color is added to old photographs. I wasn't unfamiliar with this technique - some artists use it exclusively - but I'd personally never done it to any great extent. I'm actually really pleased with how it turned out in the end though.

So let's take a look.

There are a lot of layers here, though it's hard to guess how many from a quick look over - the layer numbers can sometimes be misleading since copies are made, some go unused and others get deleted. In this case, however, the mid to high fifties seems like a fair guess. Less than many images I've done, certainly, but also not as efficiency minded as some in the past. I'd upgraded my computer and wanted to see how much I could get away with (the image is also double the size of some of my recent efforts at near 8k). 

Scaz don't need to live that life anymore.

I used a number of references while working on this image - I once again found myself constantly looking up naked men online for posing and musculature and even to get the lines in his face right - but there were a key few that I was fairly dependent on. I'd actually decided on two of my main references before building my 3D doll model (which is why so little care was given to, say, the posing of the hands) and posed it primarily to combine those two references into one unified whole. What were those references you ask?

Some Edward Cullen looking violinist and... Prince. I also took a screenshot from a video of a man playing the Hardanger fiddle and carefully skewed and transformed it until it fit into the shape of my violinist reference's instrument. 

It's important to note that my final image ultimately looks like none of these images in particular. Even the parts I, ahem, directly lifted I altered to better fit my idea of the final image, trying to make the character look older and  more world worn. The Prince image in particular was honestly rather useless beyond my initial posing - I had to go back and work out the musculature so I could add depth and lines where none existed on the airbrush-softened album art. The chest also got turned and the whole midsection is a fiction, created to bind the two images together.

The face itself is somewhere between my searches for "sexy old man" and Rob Zombie (that I've since been told somehow also resembles a few of my beaus who are/were neither old nor Rob Zombie). 

Why Mr. Zombie? Nasolabial folds and face meat! Also because he looks something like a wild mountain man to begin with. It was a very gentle reference though - the drawing looks like no one particular person specifically.

The ear is "split" as per the traditional descriptions of the water spirit. Though it probably meant something more gill like I sort of enjoy this strange almost elfin-but-not-quite appearance.

The rocks and water were drawn from imagination (I've actually had lessons on rock drawing thank you very much) and inspired by Norwegian river rocks, as the Fossegrim has it's roots in that region and the surrounding Scandinavian countries. The water would go through several alterations over the completion of the work to make the flow and (somewhat loosely based) perspective look correct.

You can see in the linework that I've added some transparency to the areas where there are waterfall sections in the final image (though if you were to look at the actual timeline this didn't actually occur until rather late in the actual image's creation).

In the end I also made the lines more muted overall to mesh better in the final image.

The bottom layers all work together to make the background, built up in layers from a mid-dark blue base. I'll go over them individually.

I should mention that I did the original lineart in Clip Studio Paint, using the free downloaded brush asset Perfect Pencil, but after that I switched to Krita and used only their built in brush suite.

Krita is completely free! It's open source and its painting engines are simply unbeatable. Clip Studio is also really solid - I use it more than Photoshop nowadays. It's my go to for sketching and lining. It has a free trial and also frequently goes on sale.

Also keep in mind I worked on them in a more unified way, building one on top of the other - I never really saw them displayed as separate layers by themselves like you will be seeing below. It's just to help make sense of what you're looking at!

I started by getting those chonky rock textures in. You can see how I've begun to block out shading, with some suggestions of dark and light, as well as starting to layer up textures to imply the texture of the rock surfaces.

Some heavier tooling. Some sharp, angled white lines to suggest form and rock cleavage, some darker, crisper lines within the lined shapes to make more firm shadows, and then just some scraggly brushes over the top for more texture. The crackles look a bit haphazard displayed like this but are much larger within the greater composition.

More angular rock shapes, this time creating definition not already implied by the lines. This one is set to 56% multiply.

More white lines to suggest that these are rough, bulky, squared off shapes with legitimate depth. Set to 86% Lighten to allow some of the texture to pass through.

And here I start hashing out the water. Lots of watercolor and foggy swampy type brushes, trying to capture that feel of turbulent water, spraying droplets, and rising mist.

More white highlights to try to capture the base of the waterfall itself and some other key spots. 83% Hard Light.

The falls themselves, just lines drawn downwards by hand with a straight multi-lined brush.

There probably should have been more of an angle to these to suggest perspective... but there isn't. I could argue it's a matter of visual interest versus emulating reality but I won't pretend I thought that hard about it.

I only now have noticed the circular halos in the main falls - an artifact from the brush that I also encountered in other places. I hadn't noticed them there though. I don't mind at all actually. They look like water glints.

Another layer that does some heavy lifting. The watery highlights that imply the river's motion. The texture effects are created by filling in the lines and then gently erasing with a large watercolor brush. There is also some manual blurring out along some of the edges, specifically those where otherwise lines did not exist (to make the pattern work I had to create a few new separations where none had been since, quite frankly, I'd not been paying attention when I first drew it). 68% Normal.

More texture for the water. Just a full once over with a big squishy brush in off-white. 32% Hard Light.

A layer that is almost impossible to make out unless you watch the gif and look for it. This is actually a dimming/darkening effect to give added depth to sections of the water.

A color tint, the first of many. A nice teal. 24% Color.

After the background was done I started work on the main subject of the image.

First I did a flat fill of the figure. This has multiple purposes - it allows me to visualize what I am working on better, lets me immediately start making tone and balance adjustments, and, perhaps most importantly, makes an easy source to create selections that I can use to mask out later sections of the image.

That way I can, for instance, paint multiple layers over the body without going over the background. 

If I'd perhaps started with a more saturated color at this stage things might have gone differently, but it's hard to say. Normally I would then do a serious of flats - skin tone, hair, fiddle, and so on. But instead I did what you'll see ahead.

First I went in with the shadows, just painting with a standard oil brush. He's starting to look a bit like a statue if I'm being honest.

Oh yeah and at some point I also added body hair. It was green by the end, which is why it looks green in this image, but started black.

Highlights were added on a separate layer. His gray flat fill works as the midtone color, so I just work into that from either direction. One of the benefits of starting from a gray layer rather than a white one!

Hard to see this one on it's own - a fairly universal darkening of the bridge of the fiddle. 39% Multiply.

Another darkening, for the lacquer black pieces. 68% Multiply.

Darkening for the wood insets around the rim. 34% Multiply.

The first color pass. A nice general skin tone. 60% Color

Setting this layer to 100% Normal does look some kind of ridiculous. It's a bit of trial and error to find the shade you want, but in most instances you can expect you'll need something a bit more dramatic as your initial application color. In this case this was done knowing the layer would be brought down in opacity some - otherwise the tones I'd added below it (in this case blue-grey) wouldn't come through as I'd wanted them to.

This one is a bit hard to see like this as well. This is actually a green tint added to some of his more shadowy areas, in part to give them a counter tone to the highlights but also to suggest some of his more watery aspects and some of the reflected tones from his environment. 29% Color. 

This one looks a bit funky set to normal and full as well. Not as bad as I'd thought it would though.

The first red pass. Adding life to his skin, especially the face, chest, hands, elbows, and knees. 31% Color

Another red pass. More subtle and more spread out, covering larger sections of his skin. 85% Normal.

Greening his hair. 100% Color.

The color ended up being much too bright, but it was to be expected - the layer I was building onto was almost white. Since I wasn't looking to get that Joker and/or trendy mermaid look, I did some darkening of the green. 59% Darken.

Adding highlights to his hair. 100% Lighten.

Adding gray to the roots of his hair and strands throughout. 100% Color (though more like lack of color in this case ammirite har har).

Adding light streaks and little gray hairs. 68% Lighten.

More pronounced streaks of silvery hair. Just building it up layer by layer. 100% Lighten.

Some harder rim lighting. 62% Hard Light.

100% Lighten. A barely noticeable touch where the light would fall on the fiddle. Will be more relevant later.

The off-white ivory inserts in the fiddle. 71% Color.

The main color of the fiddle. A yellow and orange mix to replicate the way the resin coating would react in the light. 100% Color.

The above layer set to 100% Normal. You can imagine my surprise when it ended up looking so, well... dayglo.

Easy enough to fix though. I played around using multiple interacting layers and found a nice sweet spot that really gave me that rich look I wanted.

First I duplicated the same layer and set it to 33% Darken.

Then made another copy and set it to 56% Multiply.

After getting the fiddle how I wanted I went ahead and added a blue color grading over the entire figure to better blend him into the image at large. 50% Color.

This in truth is one of the first things I did after adding the base skin tone, just as proof of concept, though I've listed it out of order here. The trailing color of skin as it disappears into the water.

A slight tinting to the water to add some warm hues into it - again to bind the image together as a unified whole.

A slight darkening to the area of his legs under water.

Next came the post-process tweaking. I flattened the image and took it into photoshop. I ended up adding two curves. This was the first, and was intended to be the final product. If only...

By the way the border was something that had existed the entire time - and was even included in the initial thumbnail design sketch. I just hadn't included it in the previous shots for... well no particular reason. It's just a circle with some rocks cut out. It's not set to 100% opacity because I honestly like some of the weird watercolor effects the spilling out of the image gives it.

The second curve adjustment layer was MUCH more dramatic and reflected what was pretty much a complete change of plan concerning the final pass.

To me it sort of looks like he's in a storm, or sitting within a cave and looking out into rain or fog.

I added heavy highlights all across the figure in a pale yellow to really emphasize the forms and create a more dramatic lighting. 35% Overlay.

And I do mean all across. 

Note the places of sharp and soft blending. The application is a bit loose here, but it changes how light is perceived to fall across the figure. I might go into more detail about this in a later guide.

How does this work at all? Well, we are basically just layering light like light gets layered in real life. If you have one light in a room and add another, the light gets compounded - it adds more light to areas where light already fell, and raises any shadowy areas by the amount that the new light adds.

Interestingly it also creates the illusion of something like sub-surface scattering in the skin. Because light was layered like an object in the scene it created the effects light would effectively create in those circumstances.

Crazy.

Moving on.

A soft glowing highlight in the palest blue like a halo bouncing up from the top portions of the figure to suggest the water bouncing off of him. 66% Soft Light.

A half vignette along the bottom of the image in black, pulling the eye up and into the image. 16% Normal

The vignette without the dropped opacity.

Which brings us back the the finished image, complete with signature.

I hope you found this write up useful!

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