Having fun with a mandala
I have loved Palehorsedesign's style since watching the timlapse of the dragon illustration, he is what made me buy a wacom. Now to be able to learn that style straight from the man himself is pretty awesome. I tried out the neuro beats background music on spotify whilst drawing and found the time flew by. Here is where I am at with my illustration at the moment. It was a lot of fun to do and looks so complex but with duplicating sections it is easy to build up the design, I am looking forward to developing it further.
As a further update for tonight, I reduced the size of the mandala and started creating another outer layer, finished up, showed my wife and she pointed out I had drawn a penis in the negative space!
A few minor corrections and the penis is now removed!
Ok, I finally got a chance to get onto the linework section of things. I did initally have trouble with the wacom changing the opactity of the brush despite my settings being the same as Chris' but I noticed I had a button turned on in the top bar of photoshop which is "always use pressure for opacity' and this was overriding everything else. Once I turned this off the rest was easy. It was tricky getting smooth and consistent lines but I guess that will come with practice, the lines towards the end were getting smoother. Here's the finished linework, looking forward to starting on the colouring tomorrow.
Here is the next stage with the colours added in, will be adding the gradients to it shortly.
So I started on the shading today and it was slow going, I found it quite frustrating at first. I think I was focusing too much on getting the highlights in the right places so I just relaxed and gave it a go and it was really good fun. I think I enjoyed this part the most as it really changes from the flat colours to having a sense of depth to it. I have only shaded a small section but here's my progress for tonight:
I have now completed the shading part, here is the final mandala.
I'm really pleased with the outcome, I think it turned out really well with nice rich, vibrant colours. I really enjoyed the whole process, especially how it transforms around the shading stage. I think that there are a few things I could improve on like the joins between the sections and making some of the gradients a bit smoother but I will leave that for mandala version 2.