Snake Shot

Well....another MGS fanart of mine. Looking forward to the release of MGS3 international version.

Done in Painter and photoshop. 1hr


**** ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ****

One of my DA friend was asking me about how to paint faster in Painter, like this Snake piece. Here is my reply to him that may be relevant to some of you here as well:

Hmm...that's a real tough question.

There are a few critical factors that affect your painting speed:

1) Level of understanding of the fundementals, such as colour theory, lighting behavior, visual harmony, anatomy...etc

2) Level of understanding of the software. In this case, Painter.

3) Level of understanding of the subject you are about to draw.

4) How much you can visualize the final image in your mind before you actually paint it.

Therefore, the speed of your painting depends on how accurately u can place a stroke on the canvas that can means something to the overall image. Young artists often make mistakes by zoming into details too soon without looking at the overall tonal values of the image. As a result, they spend too much time correcting the mistakes they spotted on the image as they progress.

For my snake pix, I used Painter's Loaded Palette Knife as the painting tool. Due to the raw and unpredictable nature of the brush, it provides great freedom for me to paint in a rough and speedy manner, and quickly get the overall tones and values down. Having said that, this in fact applies to all kind of medium, not just for palette knife.

Honestly, the software can never define your painting speed, but rather your experience and understanding of those factors I mentioned above. If you can paint fast on paper, you can paint fast on computer most possibly.

Hope it helps.