Here is a terrific piece of fantasy art submitted by artist Grant Wilson

Here are the steps involved in the creation of this picture: "Watching the Spirit."

1] The figure was drawn from a reference picture in "Dynamic figure drawing" by Burne Hogarth. The drawing was done in fine-liner pen [0.3] using techniques such as cross hatching. This was then scanned into the PC. [300 dpi or above].

2] The colouring of the figure was achieved as outlined in my "Desert riders" tutorial which can be found on this site.The white background was cut from the picture using the magic wand tool and Edit> Cut.

3] The body painting, to give the appearance of Wode, was achieved by drawing a simple pattern in Painter software and importing it into Photoshop. The pattern was pasted in place and then distorted by going to Filter> Distort> Liquify to achieve the contours of the body.

4] This pattern was then duplicated several times, re-sized and rotated to get the best fit to the curves of the figure.

5] The layers were then merged by going to Layer> Merge visible.

6] This leaves us with the complete figure.

7] The background was a colour wash with the paint bucket tool on a new layer.

8] Again on a new layer I added the foreground gradient using the gradient tool. The texture of the background was achieved by painting "flames" on a new layer and adding noise to the proceedings with Filter>noise. This layers blend mode was adjusted to "linear burn" and placed behind the figure but on top of the colour wash.

9] The tree was again drawn with graphics tablet in painter using a suitable coloured 2b pencil. A new layer was added for each different tone. This was saved as a photoshop file and imported into elements. The tree was then adjusted and placed behind the figure.

10] The final step was to duplicate the figure layer and resize and rotate it. I then went to Filter> Distort> Wave to achieve the rippling effect, this layers blend mode was set to "overlay".

11] Finally I flattened all the layers by going to Layer> Flatten image!

12] The complete image was then saved to my hard-drive.

The image is Copyright© Grant Wilson 2010. Please feel free to have a look at my Art!

You can see more of his artwork by visiting his websites:

• http://grantwilson.redbubble.com
• http://charge79.deviantart.com/gallery/
• http://grantwilson.daportfolio.com/

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