Justin Gerard
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"The Aphid Rancher" Final Color and Guide
🕑 Added 2025-01-28 15:12:35 +0000 UTC
This month's Monster of the Month is the Aphid Rancher. Though not quite a monster himself, his aphids definitely are. (If you ask the tomato plant anyway.) The Aphid Rancher is a character personifying the tragedy of the commons. "Take everything you can, let others care for the common good!" He exists only for his aphid honeydew, and the rest of the world can burn so long as he's got it.
This character was done as an exploration for a project Annie and I have been slowly developing. My goal this month was to produce one character painted in pencil and digital, and then month to paint another in oil. We will compare the two to see which fits the format of our project best.
Being an exploratory image, it is a bit of a learning experience, and there are mistakes here and there that I am hope to not repeat in the future. For one, I had hoped to produce a very simple vignette of the character, which would feature the single figure knocked out from the background with only a sparse suggestion of his leafy environment. Instead I got carried away and ended up drawing a whole panoply of dying leaves and a lush, dew drop-laden leaf with aphids charging toward it, and then an entire horde of aphids in the background, and after a bit it just sort of became a full illustration. In hindsight, I wish I would have picked a lane, either singling out just the character, or painting a full illustration. Lesson learned. Still, I really enjoy this for what it is and had a lot of fun with the character!
PROCESS GUIDE:
This painting made in the usual style of light, color, & blend; light, color, & blend on repeat until it looks finished. ("Finished" can be a somewhat vague target, I know.) As you can see in the style guide below, I went through this cycle only twice here before landing on a spot I was happy with:
For the Lighting passes, I tend to use brushes set to multiply and warm neutral colors to darken, and for light I am using pure white with very opaque brushes. The effect is nice murky shadows, and sharp, detailed highlights with a lot of interesting information in them.
For the color passes I am doing much the same, using brushes set to either multiply or soft light to slowly build up transparent dark colors, and then bright opaque brushes for the higher, saturated colors. (You'd think I'd have found a way to combine these two steps by now, but that fabled passage remains elusive.)
Finally I blend these together, primarily using mixer brushes. Formerly, I was working on billions of layers, but nowadays I am all on one layer, fingers crossed I don't screw anything up. So far I like it for the time it saves, and the simplicity and directness it encourages.
When in doubt, just take the next step. If I get lost, I start over, add a layer of light over my current section, then add color over that light, then blend them together, and keep going!
Comments
Lance Red
Thanks for the reply Justin; look forward to seeing the side by side. This has been something I have been struggling with as well; as it sort of took the wind out of my art sails. Cause even if one does not work in Adobe due to AI, still does not escape the AI fishing over the internet, on portfolio sites, or socials. But art still needs to be made...Se la vie. Same for me, in that I am hoping to dive deeper in to oils on a more regular basis.
Justin Gerard
Good question! I actually wrote a whole extra paragraph on this, but it felt very doomer, which wasn’t the tone I was going for in the post, so I deleted it. But I should have kept it. The tldr is that my outlook on gen-AI is still very negative, and I do not recommend anyone use Adobe right now. (Can’t wait for Procreate desktop!) But I did this one in Adobe to have a good apples-to-apples comparison for this project using watercolor vs digital vs oil. I am doing an oil painting right now, and I will be sharing that one next. My goal is still to slowly eliminate digital from my personal work as much as possible, but I want to make sure I am keeping the same level of quality. It will be an ongoing journey for me!
Lance Red
Hello Justin, fun post, always enjoy seeing your process breakdowns. You may have given an update on this in Twitch or in another post and I missed it: how are you feeling in regards to digital painting in Photoshop and using it going forward? Last Fall, you sounded pretty discouraged with it given Adobe's AI push. Is it at a point now to ignore whatever Adobe is doing and just keep painting in PS because it is still a fantastic painting tool? I've been debating this myself. For now, with digital, I'm mainly back to working in Procreate (which I do like), but I do miss working on my larger Huion setup.
