Rose Illustration: June 2013

This is my process in Photoshop that I go through to create illustrations. I wanted to create my version of a vampire, since a lot of movies lately such as Twilight have changed the vampires to more human which is a travesty on my end. They're supposed to be scary un-dead creatures that used to have human life. I wanted to recreate the vampire with human qualities and emotion but see the creatures they have become upon death.

The structure, with every drawing there has to be an underlying structure to start off with to figure out the composition. I have a light opacity of black.

The drawing, I usually start with a drawing, much like pencil to paper, except digitally done. This stage further refines the composition. I use a different color and 100% opacity.

I usually start with the skin, however, every artist is different when starting with a certain area, usually a lot of artists start with the eyes...as I used to do. This consists of 4-5 layers of different skin colors to get a dynamic.

I've added more tones to the skin as relation to the overall composition, the eyes are striking at this point because of the horror aspect of this illustration.

It's still very very rough at this point but further refined than the previous steps.

At this point, I've added a dark background and black wherever it needed it to be, however, I was at a standstill when it came to the background composition. I knew I wanted a moon and I wanted it to be night time...But couldn't decide on what the overall composition should be about.

One night, I looked up into the sky and the moon was low and blood red I decided to go with a red moon because of its ominous presence it conveyed to me that one night.