Traditional Artist Workshop
Pencil Acrylic Oils
Illustrator THOMAS ELLIOTT gives us his step-by-step guide for mixing traditional mediums as he creates a horrifying mutant creature
Over my time as an artist, I’ve developed many excellent tricks and learned from a number of pitfalls while painting traditionally, which is a medium I love. Those vital tidbits of advice are what I want to share with you in this workshop.
As artists, we have the unique ability to pull things into existence from our minds! It always gives me great pleasure to bring the horrific denizens of my imagination to life. As a result, I know the importance of realism; if something is believable it becomes that much more real.
That’s why I’m always paying a lot of attention to the technical side of character creation. Elements such as the lighting, anatomy, understanding colour, and how best to describe the materials is absolutely vital. I often find myself adding lots of detail, and it was a goal with this image to paint efficiently, meaning I could lay down plenty of details at an early stage and have them still be useful at the end.
I’m always using various methods, from digital to oil painting, and pen and ink. I love how each medium requires you to think differently and offers different advantages. This is why my work often features lots of mediums, as I aim to combine the best qualities of each. In this tutorial I use a variety of tools including oil, acrylic and Photoshop.
I’ll start off following the typical approach of creating thumbnails, and explain my thought process as I work from a pencil drawing through to underpainting, overpainting and the finishing touches.
Thomas Elliott is a leading artist in the wargaming industry. He worked in-house at Games Workshop for over five years and is now the art director and lead illustrator for Archvillain Games. www.artstation.com/thomaselliott
1 Create thumbnails
The cornerstone of any good picture. These are super quick biro scribbles with the aim of quickly exploring ideas and interesting shapes without investing too much time. I knew I wanted to do an evil humanoid mutant with tentacles, and there were a few directions I could go with. One was a thin mutant carrying a huge gun, while another was a hulking, top-heavy mutant charging towards the viewer.
2 Choose your direction
After about an hour of caffeine-fuelled thumbnail madness, I started to figure out what exactly I wanted to do. I liked the design possibilities of the hulking mutant but felt the action pose might be a bit much, so I focused on doing a static pose that allowed
