[Behind-the-Scenes] DAVON'S MATRIARCH

Hello!

So the idea for this painting was born many months ago, when I visited Bihar. I think the roots also go back to a year ago when I visited the beautiful Udaipur.

I began with saving up a lot of images on Pinterest which gave more fuel to this idea. One of the key images on my mood board was this set of images of an Indian lady in a crimson saree.

I’ve seen the concept of regal presented a lot in western media, but I wanted to mix it with whatever this image is “giving”, because honestly, this is very regal to me. Anyways, I had the idea, but no where to channel it. What would I even draw? Then came another stroke of inspiration:

In Elden Ring, one of the best boss fight arenas is Placidussax’s. The circular shape with leading lines going all the way to the middle, the graves on the floor and oh god the beautiful color palette. It’s very renaissance-esque. Absolutely stellar art direction. It also has a palette I haven’t played with. So I wanted to attempt it.

I had my palette, I kinda had a setting I wanted to draw, and I knew I wanted to depict an Indian woman. The thing is there are many iconic Indian women. Since Placcidusax is a dragon lord, I decided to draw a godly figure. In Hindu mythology one of the most powerful beings is Durga. Born/made-to-kill kinda strong. She’s an amazing character to draw from as she also has a pet tiger Davon, which would be an interesting element to include. It’s also a challenge because I haven’t often attempted drawing a stylized animal. I started doodling and came up with the idea of Durga standing in a crowd of people and clutching her sword, giddy at the idea of killing a demon. Davon is her servant/ flagbearer and he holds an umbrella over her, looking at her with concern, like “umm is she the demon..” (Also I am just using Durga and Davon as inspiration only. Yet I'll keep calling the main characters with those names for the sake of simplicity. I am not trying to be mythologically accurate, I'm just trying to have fun.)

Anyways the sketch kinda turned out goofy. Look at Davon lol. He looks soo down, and not the vibe I was going for. He improved as I kept drawing more. 

One of the hardest and most time consuming parts of a painting for me is the lineart. I prefer everything to be neatly structured before I even touch the colors. The foundation needs to be strong. Especially for a painting this intricate, I need to plan everything. There are going to be several people, various kinds of jewellery and so many kinds of clothes and props. I tend to knock all these off in the lineart stage so I don’t get surprised later on. So I keep refining the sketch.

In the sketching phase one of the toughest aspects were the expressions. I took major inspirations from the works of Glenn Keane and Shiyoon Kim. I also took a lot of inspiration from Indian bridal jewellery. In this rough sketching stage I am being extremely loose and setting the broad ideas down. I can refine them later so I am not that attached to them.

I had divided the painting into three elements based on their level of importance. Firstly it’s the two central characters, then the crowd and finally the background. I tackled the painting in a similar fashion. Main characters, crowd, background.

Once I had a rough sketch of the main characters, I decided to make a very rough final look of the painting. This would act as an underpainting. I squint my eyes and roughly put some noise and colors on the canvas. It’s kind of like visualizing an end goal before setting out on the journey. You know, to give me some direction and motivation. In this stage I change the aspect ratio to an even wider canvas. I wanted the piece to seem grand and cinematic and this would help sell that. 

Once the rough of Durga and Davon, and the underpainting is done we have this:


To push the yellows and the overall warmth a bit more, I used the curves and color balance adjustment layers.


I moved on to the final lineart for our main characters. Here I am referencing a lot of indian jewellery I found on Pinterest. It also helps me when I design characters to have some sort of story in mind. For example, for the sword, I thought since our main character loves killing, and is essentially a god, I should convey that. A way I can show that she is kinda psychotic is by her boney sword made out of a contorted skeleton of a demon. The gold she adorns is beautiful but then she's got a metallic skull as her shoulder pad on her dominant arm. On the other is a beautiful golden bird, which might represent the idea of freedom, hope even. I loved designing this juxtaposition.

Here are some important references for Durga:


For Davon’s design I had several stories. He is emaciated and wears rags. That might suggest that he is enslaved by Durga. But then again the way he looks at her is more like a guardian. In fact, it’s almost endearment. So maybe he is not enslaved, rather devoted to a fault. His rags are hidden by a plethora of jewellery, almost like a cover-up for an ugly truth? On his shoulder is a skull which seems to be growing and taking hold of his body. Might be what remains of a strong foe he battled long ago. His war shield is intricate, and gives him a daunting presence which is important. He is a servant of a Goddess after all.

Some important references for Davon:


Once the lineart and all details are finished we have this:

I let stories guide me further. It’s time to design the crowd. I love the idea of this being some kind of protest. Maybe against tyranny. Or maybe it's an angry mob looking for justice. Something terrible must’ve happened. Some great injustice, which brought people together. I decided to make the mob blind, glass eyed. And the people who had vision wrapped blindfolds in solidarity. Even in this state they are able to sense the A U R A (I'm sorry) of the main characters.

Here is the initial sketch of the mob and the final lineart which finishes the lineart phase. The background consists of simple pillars, so I decided to tackle that entirely in the painting phase, save for a few lines:


Having set a very strong foundation, I could now have a lot of fun. I decided to paint in order of how much attention an element would get, and so I started with Durga’s face. I started with blocking out the different elements in the painting and defining a clearer silhoutte so later on I can use the clipping mask tool and paint without having to worry about spillage. I am using the Color Dyno WC for this because I love the textures it leaves.

There are a few things I always remind myself while I paint. Firstly, the shapes are important. Good shapes can make your painting easily digestible and you won't need a lot of rendering to convey forms and light. Second is that a shadow is just where a particular light source can’t reach but others light sources can (think of ambient light). Third are the textures. I was going for a grunge-y organic and traditionally painted look for this piece and that means that textures will be an important tool. Finally the light sources. In my head, dark clouds would loom over wherever this scene is taking place. I thought this would add drama and mystique to the piece. Smoke and dust trails would fill the arena, and it would be lit from a strong back light. The smoke would dissipate this light. Also some sunlight would be seen peaking through the clouds every so often. Another source of light and probably the brightest would be Durga’s boney sword. I needed to keep all these factors in mind because these light sources would dictate not only what colors I choose but also what shapes I make.   



Shapes created by light and shadow can define a 3D form very easily and I made sure my shapes are simple and pleasing to look at. I knew one of the biggest light sources would be Durga’s sword, which emits almost neon greenish yellow light. Being so close to the face I can take advantage of it to define the shape of the face. I knew yellow will affect the orangish skin tone drastically because of how close the two colors are on the color wheel. In the region where light from the sword isn’t falling, I let a bit of skylight affect it. I also love grunge water color textures. So I used the Dilu 90 brush to texturize the face a bit more. I am also mindful of the fact that values matter the most in making an image read well. Typically in an image of this color and lighting, you would rarely find rich blues. Because blue and yellows are completely opposite colors. What you would find instead are greens. But I thought damn would it look striking to have rich blue as the whites of the eyes. I can get away with it if as long as I keep my values in check.

The hair had a similar process. Define shapes using light and use colors from the light sources in the surrounding areas. In the end, we had this:

Painting metal has always been a challenge for me. But a few things helped me. Core shadow, that is the darkest color, can be used to define the shape. Because it’s a reflective surface, depending on how reflective it is, the shape of the core shadow will get thinner or thicker, and more or less defined. Metal can be really fun is what I have realised recently. Since I am painting mostly gold for Durga, all my shadow and light colors on metal would be slightly yellow shifted. I try to do that manually through the color wheel but another technique would be to just paint your desired color of light or shadow and pick the resulting color as it would naturally be slightly yellow shifted. References helped me a ton. I decided to change the color of the metallic skull to a reflective silver to improve readability. At the end of this process we have this:

Moving on to the more intricate and smaller jewels. For these, I think it’s always important to not get lost in the details. I say this now but it was extremely hard to do honestly. I had to keep reminding myself to zoom out and paint. What I've discovered recently is that for smaller reflective things, I can imply quite a bit of detail through just 2-4 dots of paint. With that in mind I painted the rest of the jewellery.

Also for the bird I had a really good reference from a lectern I found in a church. I found a really good 3D model on SketchFab and took a few screenshots.

For the fabric I had a few good references too. I just had to remember that anything under the fabric will be slightly red shifted, and that where ever the fabric bunched up the reds would become more dominant. Durga was starting to really come together.

Davon is rich blue in color (though he is a tiger) (no it's not lore accurate). That was honestly a stylistic decision to make the main characters stand out in a sea of yellow. Painting blue skin is kinda jarring solely because I know that it's supposed to be skin. So I had to mentally block out the fact that I am painting skin. I knew the shadows would be slightly warmer than the lighter parts, because the ambient light is of course very yellow-y. I say slightly because I know an extremely cold color like blue would not budge that easily by a comparatively feeble ambient yellow light. It would at best get a bit desaturated. To introduce color variations and more interest I added a deep saturated blue as the transition color between light and shadow and a slight bit of pink for a little warmth in the lit region of his skin. I had to remind myself often that blue is a rather dark color, so some of the ambiently occluded regions can get pretty black.

The cloak Davon wears is also pretty simple. I used greenish color for the highlight as I imagined the cloak to be dark and desaturated and would get slightly influenced by the warm light. To suggest the warm light I also scribbled on top of the lit region. It’s fun, gets the job done and leaves an interesting texture. In the end we have this:


I found a beautiful 3D model reference for the skull he adorns on SketchFab. Skulls are kinda off-white and so they can be easily affected by a warm yellow light. I used this reference to get my colors more or less. For interest, I added a bit of pink and cyan in there. Pink/magenta being right between warm and cool hues helps it be a very versatile color for color vibrations.

The gold bits in this were just repetition of rules I had set from painting gold on Durga. I just used a color picker and painted the details in. For the intricate engravings. What helps a lot is having some basic tones of light and shadow down, and then cut and carve the shapes you made. What was really surprising is how much scribbling helps. I had to be careful not to overdo it, because it’s very tempting.

The jewels Davon adorns are again, very intricate, which means its zoom-out-and-paint time. They are made out of silver so I had a bit of fun being freed from gold’s color restrictions. Anyways with that our two main characters were more or less done. 

The umbrella was surprisingly challenging. But I trusted my process. Per usual, I blocked out the main shape of the umbrella, then carved out the light and shadow shapes. Since the material was translucent, some light from the back would pass through and illuminate the shadow shape. Just doing that brought me quite a long way. An issue rose at this point, which was that the color red was becoming quite dominant in that general region, blending everything into one shape. So, I brought back some gold for the frills at the edge of the umbrella.

Moving onto the G L O W Y bit of the sword! It was very fun to draw. I included some cyans and pinks as an accent to the neon greenish yellow glow.

The sword hilt was quite a challenge though. In the beginning I was struggling with what kind of texture to go for for the hilt of the weapon. Because again at this point I realised everything was kinda blending into each other. I finally settled on a normal boney texture. I constantly checked my values to see if things are legible.

Legibility around the umbrella region became quite an issue at this point so I decided to use the content aware fill tool in photoshop to remove a few elements. Then I painted over the image for a few corrections.

At this point I wanted to go through another pass to show the lighting from the sword more prominently as depicted below. I used a “lighter color” layer for the glow and to separate the sword from the rest of her body, kinda bring it to the forefront. Manually painted a few strokes for the light.

Now it was time to roughly block out the colors for the crowd. Going back to a few of my renaissance painting references gave me some color ideas for this piece. Also at this point I had already made a new Curves Adjustment layer, for the final color adjustment for the piece. It always gave me a fresh eye for the painting and helped me gauge if I was going in the right direction. 

 At this point, I found another issue with the piece. The blue of Davon’s skin was sticking out abnormally against the rest of the piece. With the current lighting setup there is no way the blue will largely remain this saturated, especially when the other equally strong blues (from the crowd) have all shifted a bit towards the greens and the cyans. By painting that and using those colors I had created a new rule in my painting and if Davon’s skin didn’t follow that rule, He would stick out. I needed to fix it and I did so with a HSL layer.

I would still keep painting without the major color adjustment layer simply because I was more used to painting with the rules I had been painting with. So I turned it off for now.

Even with the lighting and all painted in, I thought I could push it further with a few Multiply and Linear Dodge layers. With my lighting scenario of sunrays beaming through clouds and a simple soft round brush I was able to add quite a drastic shift to the lighting of the piece.

Now the main values were properly established for the crowd. It was now just the matter of being patient and adding details. I knew the crowd is not the main focus so I need not go as hard on rendering. Just a light shape, a shadow shape and a bounce light shape. This took me through the rendering phase of the crowd. Not tough, but tedious. Still it was fun because the painting was finally coming together.

Once the crowd was done, it was time to move onto the background pillars. I knew I didn't need to put a lot of effort in these. Not only are they very far away, they are also obscured by a lot of atmosphere which will block out quite a bit of their details. They were lit mostly by the harsh back light. The atmosphere has confined their values and reduced the contrast, which made the job easy for me hehe. The pillars are also slightly lit from the ground because of the back light bouncing upwards after hitting the ground. Keeping all that in mind I painted the pillars.

Then I painted in the glassy eyes for the crowd. For Durga and Davon I had normal brown eyes in mind.


I did one last color adjustment to really push the warm tones of the painting. I painted in some accent colors on top to really pop out the vibrancy. It’s usually at the edges of objects and their outlines for me.

Over the top I had added one last layer in multiply mode to push the shadows slightly. Then a linear dodge layer added a small amount of glow to the piece.


Now for the last bit of the painting I shift the image to the “Mix” app on ipad to see if there are any fun filters I can use. I do a bit of color adjustments on top of everything. Once I was somewhat satisfied I copied the whole image and applied a heavy gaussian blur on it. Then reduced the opacity to give the image a bit of a dreamlike effect that I love. I added a bit of chromatic aberration and a slight noise to bring everything to a close.


And that wraps up the first Tutorial Blog kinda thing for the Callisto, Nohr-Zenith and Plathomar tier members. I really hope this helped you guys out, in any way really. Your support means a lot to me. Also I am kinda new to this, I promise these will get better so bear with me! Again thank you so much and all the very best with whatever it is you create.  

-Jay