BBF Technical Director Donnchadh, working on Henry Hugglemonster, started doodling in photoshop and we asked him to share his, stunning, first efforts.

My background was in games, I've worked as a character artist in the gaming industry for about 12 years. I've been a concept artist, modeller, texture artist, rigger, animator, lighter and working in TV and Film was always a dream - so I'm delighted to come work with Brown Bag Films. I started here as a modeller, then moved onto rigging, now I’m working as a TD.

The studio has some incredibly talented, creative, down to earth people. Everybody is very supportive of each other and wonderful to work with. I started following the work of some of my colleagues here: Phil McDarby, Barry O'Donoghue, Andrew Hamilton and Stephen O'Connor to name a few, but there are many many more!

I thought I might start doing a bit of 2D doodling myself.

I started by messing around in Photoshop using the touchpad on my laptop to see if I could create a “finger painting” of sorts. It looked ok and I posted it on facebook. A lot of my BBF friends liked it and gave positive comments, which inspired me to create some more.

I'm a big fan of black and white images on a black canvas, one of my favourite pieces, which I created in college, was a plant I drew, where I blackened the page with a piece of charcoal and used an eraser to bring out the highlights. It created a huge amount of depth in the image. So I wanted to try my hand at some photoreal painting. I searched for some nice portraits on Google and stumbled across a photographer called Lee Jeffries. His stuff is amazing so I decided to try and sketch a few paintings using his work as reference.

The way I like to work is to get an image I want to draw, size the canvas to a size that I want the final piece to be, then create a blank canvas the same size and fill the background with black. I place both canvases side by side in photoshop. I colour grab from the photo and then start blocking out the the image onto the blank canvas whilst refering constantly to the photo. The reason I make the canvases the same size is so that if I zoom into the eye so my canvas size is 67% I can zoom into 67% on the photo too so that the reference is the same scale, this helps with keepng the image on scale.

This next piece was done using a mouse, you can see from the progress picture that I started roughly blocking out the overall highlights, then zooming in and working into the detail a bit more. I used the default soft round brush in Photoshop, (I haven't yet mastered all the different brushes available).

The final piece took about 7 hours in total:

This next piece was also done with a mouse and again it's drawn from a photograph taken by Lee Jeffries. I just used a standard soft brush because it was done with the mouse and the mouse has no pressure sensivity, which meant that I had to put the pressure and flow down to about 35% and build up the layers.

The final piece, as you can see is quite scratchy and it took about 12 hours to complete:

This next piece was done using my wacom, and was based on a photograph by Joshi Daniels. The wacom, obviously, is the weapon of choice for any digital artist. It gives you more of a feeling of using a pen or a brush. It means you get a nice, soft feel and you can blend the shades together more seemlessly.

I was quite happy with this one, it took about 14 hours to complete. Again this is still using only the round smooth brush and nothing fancy. I will eventually get around to learning some new brushes.

Here's where I stop.

If you have any questions, comments or want to see more of my work, drop a comment here, and I'll be happy to get back to you!