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The buzz this month is all about an upcoming artist show called Chubby Bunny. We caught up with Phil Holland to get the juicy details on his art submission into the show.

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In this article I’ll attempt to explain briefly my basic digital painting process for the Chubby Bunny painting. Adobe Photoshop is my weapon of choice, however there are a few other painting applications that are good for digital illustration. Namely Corel Painter. However, Photoshop won me over long ago and I’ll focus on that.

Step 1 – The Thumbnail

There’s many ways to attack an illustration and digital space opens up even more possibilities. Sometimes I’ll start straight in Photoshop with some blobby shapes, sometimes I’ll do a line drawing straight into Photoshop with my tablet, but if I can and if I have time I prefer to draw with a good old pencil and scan in the drawing. In this situation I did about 30 thumbnails in pencil. All of them around 3 inches by 2 inches. Keeping it realllllly rough I dropped in my basic shapes and ideas. The goal here is to quickly lay down your concept without over thinking. You really should only be focusing on shapes and composition.

Step 2 – The Color Rough

So now that I have a thumbnail I’m happy with I’ll go ahead and scan the sketch into Photoshop and do a basic color rough by creating a new layer and setting it to multiply. By doing this you can paint on top of the sketch without effecting the drawing. I’ll sometimes open up a separate blank canvas and just scribble around with different colors, mixing and blending until I have a palette I like. I did exactly that for the clowns pants in this painting. Other than that what I’m thinking about here is how the viewer will see the peace. I want people to start looking at the middle of the painting and work their way out from there. So I decided to drop in a cooler color in the center of the frame and have the rest of the painting be more of a warm palette.

Step 3 – The Line Drawing

Now for this particular painting I knew that I would be painting the whole thing and not have any of the original line drawing show through. So my line drawing didn’t need to be too tight. I really just focused on the face and regulator on the helium bottle. Also I mapped out the single point perspective for the clowns room. I didn’t make it perfectly straight on because that’s always just sort of boring to look at. I wasn’t too sure on the size of the door. Originally I wanted a tiny door that he couldn’t fit through, but in the end I went with something more realistic.

Step 4 – Underpainting

I still had the file from Step 2 and I just copied the layer and resized it to fit my canvas. However, this time I set the line drawing to multiply and painted “under” it. I did this because I’ll be painting directly on the drawing later on and it’s just easier to deal with. I blocked in a few more colors on the clown and helium bottle too.

Step 5 – Paint, Paint, Paint!

Now it’s time to buckle up and get to painting. I put on some good music and started painting away. This is the stage where a lot of on the canvas problem solving needs to happen. This painted was done at 5k. I knew I was going to be getting large prints made of this so I worked at a very high resolution. I decided to start at the clowns face. It’s the main selling point of the image and the expression was a tough one for me to nail. It’s pretty subtle and sort of sad. I figure if I’m not happy with his head I can still perhaps start again without investing too much time in the painting. I blocked in the door finally and started adding some details to the walls. As you can see I’m already getting bored with the clown shoe concept. I wanted to project a sort of magical situation as well and the shoes just weren’t doing it for me.

Step 6 – More Painting!

Now I’m really painting. No more line drawing to really worry about. I added the air line for the helium tank and the ghostly face in the black mirror-ish thing. The composition feels a bit right heavy so I started punching more details on the left side of the frame to see if it would balance out. I started blocking in more details on the door using the line tool (the needle was also created with the line tool). With the inflated bunny, door, and creepy green wall I begin to feel a little bit more confidant about the composition. I found a creative solution to the feet problem. In another sketch I had the clown missing limbs and in a different costume. I figured that a neat way to deal with the shoes would be to outline their location and have the feet and legs missing – yet still cast a shadow. This helps with the eerie mood I’m trying to portray. I also added a footprint of an electric socket behind the helium tank because that wall was looking boring.

Step 7 – Even More Painting!

Things are looking okay. It’s time to noodle. I decide to play around with a few custom brushes I created in Photoshop. They help out when texturing things like the cracks in the wall, the electric storm outside, and adding personality to the door and floor. I color corrected the bunny to a different color. I also add some funky colors to the window. I really wanted that to be over the top for some reason.

Step 8 – Refining

So I’m pretty content with the painting as is. Now it’s time to refine some details and add the little extra punch to make the image a bit more interesting. Most visible is the weird magical glow surrounding the needle. I added a lot more detail to the walls and floor. Also I thought it would be interesting if I had the hand cast a shadow on the floor. I also took some time here to color correct a few areas like the floor, door, and right wall.

Step 9 – The Final Image.

This was a quick one. The entire painting was done in one sitting. About six hours of straight painting. I just added my signature and did a test print to make sure everything would be okay when I sent the file to New Jersey to get the proof and final prints made.

Some Crops.

While painting away you’ll find you have time to play around a bit. This piece was for a theme based show and has a humorous yet eerie mood to it. So I decided to add a few things like the mad face button. These are things you’ll only notice on the large print and hopefully will keep the viewer searching for other things I dropped in. I left in a good portion of my brush strokes to help the painting look and feel more spontaneous. A big problem with a lot of digital artwork is that everything gets smoothed out and lacks personality. I tried hard to avoid that here.

The real test will be peoples reactions to the painting at The Chubby Bunny Show this month at the Nucleus Gallery in Alhambra from February 11th-March 4th.