A T A R I A L

this one turned out to be quite the mission to draw, had a great ref for the head but the body one was so low quality 😅 think i managed to make it work somewhat

here's the 2 of them together! drew lestat 2 years ago straight after the s3 teaser, and then with the latest episode had a thought to make these 2 portraits match more...

was waiting for s3 to finally do a companion piece of louis for my earlier lestat, and so here he is! will post a version with lestat too

Among your many talents, you have a wonderful ability to create starfields. I wonder if you would be willing to give any advice on creating and rendering starfields?

I've been so delighted with the variation of backgrounds in your individual Star Trek portraits. It would be repetitive to mention every time, but I notice how much effort goes into the backgrounds each time as well!

Hi! thank you! yes this is something i've expanded on with working on the trek portraits so i'll do a little breakdown of what i do

first is that all the reference is from nasa, don't want any ai muck in the refs aha https://images.nasa.gov/

then i rotate or just do a section of an image, whatever i think might look best

for example i'll use the bg for my jake portrait, with which i used this image here as the ref

then i do a soft layer of colour first, mapping out what i'm drawing out. i find having this as a separate layer means i can add colours to the piece without destroying the more detailed layer above

(added and erased on this layer as i went so it's not the initial first pass anymore)

then a more detailed layer using a nebula brush i bought 10 years ago from kyle t webster, sadly they're not available to buy separately anymore, plus my usual painting brush which is a slightly adjusted default pastel brush in photoshop

and then the stars, again with a star brush from kyle t webster, plus i paint in a few 'hero' stars that are prominent in the ref

good tip with stars is to do a couple different colours in them, red and orange and blue and purple are good alongside whiter stars

then at the very end i have a blurred low opacity soft light layer over everything to brighten and blur everything a little

said i was gonna draw kes once i'd done my voyager crew pic, and here she is!

It's my 15 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

recently finally upgraded my cintiq after 11 years! took a little to get it going and used to the changes, so drew this lestat as a quick test :D