Painting Storm

©2014 B. Lewis

 

A new challenge has presented itself forcing me to exercise complete creativity and control over what I paint and how I paint it. I have a little less than a month to try and create enough material to take to a comic expo this year and I’ve got plenty of mixed feelings about it. The main one is being fear. Will my work be good enough? Can I really pull this off? Well of course I can!!!!

When this opportunity presented itself, I was actually in the midst of another work, that’s coming along fantastically and while I was rendering some video footage for it, I decided to proceed with at least the sketch of my first “Comic Expo” piece. I decided to go with one of my favorite characters first: Storm.

©2014 B. Lewis - Storm Sketch

I had an image in mind and I decided to begin with the sketch and I stumbled across a photograph that captured exactly what I was going for which made some of the guess-work easier. Once I had my sketch complete, tailored to my version of Storm, I began blocking in color and layering highlights, mid-tones and shadows. I worked for a couple of hours and though it looked good, it wasn’t coming together as I’d hoped, so I tweaked what I had done and kept working, until finally I had my character. In total, I spent roughly 4 hours, give or take on this painting and I’m really happy with the end result (and I had plenty of moments where I wasn’t sure I was going to be). When I had gotten to the point where I knew I had done what I’d envisioned, it put a smile on my face and all the self doubt, melted down to this warm fuzzy feeling of confidence in myself and my work.