Hi guys!

Today I have a step-by-step tutorial of one of my favourite pieces yet; Newt Scamander from Fantastic Beasts! I painted the drawing about a month before the movie came out, so the sign for the Blind Pig is not accurate, but I hope you can forgive me for that.

If you want to know how I start a new drawing, I would suggest you visit these tutorials:

Colour process – Reference tutorial – Study Tutorial – Customise your brushes

1. First of all, I picked the images below as reference pictures: one to serve as reference for the global painting and for the initial pose of Newt, and one for his face ( I wanted him to face towards the spectator).

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2. Set up a blank document (this one was 6500 x 9000 px with a 300 DPI) and start with your basic lines.

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Just make sure you fill up those basic shapes and lines. As you can see in the next image, there are some differences in value in the buildings: The ones that appear to be close by have a higher value than the buildings that are in the background.

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2. Time to present Newt! I added a new layer and set up his basic lines in a complementary colour so that I would not get my lines mixed up. I adjusted his height a little bit with the help of the Transform option (Crtl + T).

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3. I continued drawing Newt by defining his initial line-art with a darker colour and made progress on his facial features. The buildings in the background as well as the ground got a more smoothed look as I gradually worked on top of the original lines.

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4. As a next step, Newt got some more shading and value to add details.

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5.  Colours! I wanted to have an orange – blue palette for this drawing, so I made an orange gradient- and blue gradient layer and set them to softlayer, the image below shows the result of that change.

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I then kept playing with some colours layers and their options before I settled on a definitive palette. Furthermore, the street got a neat texture (found on http://www.textures.com )

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6. Portrait time! I set up the face reference next to my drawing document and began painting his gorgeous face. ( To see how you can paint a portait from photo reference, click here: Reference tutorial )

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7.  The following steps included more definition in colour as well as adding more details and shading to the surrounding buildings.

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8. I felt like there was someting missing so I started adding Frank into the painting. Deliberatly placed him between the buildings, hoping it would create a better dynamic in composition.

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9. And I thought the Niffler should be in there to! In the background you can also see a Hippogriff. Again, made sure that the objects that I placed in the background have a more ‘merged’ look.

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10. Color dodge time! For the final painting I added several more layers to play with colours, lights, ‘special effects’. As you probably have noticed I added a sign to the rights, as well as the title in the front. The blue and orange clouds you can see at Newts feet are a seperate color dodge layer. ( To see how to color dodge, click here: Color Dodge )

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And that is about it! Any thoughts on the next tutorial? Let me know in the comments below.

Love, Eve

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