Cruz-Ramos Illustration

Returning home.

Thank you my faithful followers for continuing to follow me even through my absence. In thanks for your patience heres a new time lapse video for your video pleasures! 

Another portrait, this time of a very loving and good friend of mine. 

This is actually an extremely belated christmas present that I was never able to get around to finishing because of other obligations; so I'm declaring it christmas in july and finally finishing this bad boy! 

are you in dire need of a portrait of your self and would like to commission me for one?

Send an e-mail my way and lets start talking! 

Portrait commission from a very beautiful friend of mine. :) 

Want me to do a portrait of you?

Drop me an e-mail and I'll give you a pricing quote! 

Hey babes! 

I still have a couple prints each of my senior show pieces if you're interested in owning some! 

These are 9" x 12" Premium luster prints. They come in their own protective sleeves to prevent damages and are signed! 

I would love to find these prints a loving home so head over to my website and get one while they last! 

One layer painting. This is pretty much how I begin all of my paintings. With black and white value paintings. 

Because I like you guys so much, I made a dropbox link to a folder containing my entire collection of custom brushes found through out the internets. It's contains a TON of neat stuff! So download, drag into your photoshop brush set folder and start playing around! 

If you still have the default brushes that come with photoshop, DELETE those buggers and use these instead! 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nmqmofu23wdejxe/Brushes%20Collection.zip

My favorite set personally is the Fine art brush set. I use these majority for all of my work, it gives the feel and look of that traditional brush painting texture and is super awesome all around!

I use these brushes with photoshop CS5 and up, not sure if they'll work for versions lower then that, but try it out and see!

Before starting anything, I do a LOT of research about my subject before hand. In this case, I read the Neverending story book, and picked out points in the story I thought were pivotal. 

From there I started doing thumbnails, I did about 15 thumbnails for each piece, exploring different options of the same subject and picking the one that worked the best. 

After thumbnails, I do a refined sketch, which are the ones I including in the posts on here. Once I’m happy with the route it’s going, I start gathering references, some found, some taken my self. For the figures, I asked my friends to pose for me in the position needed. References are REALLY important and I gather as much as I can for each element just to have that extra clarity. For the never ending story: Turtles, lions, ferrets, temples, trees, swamps ect. 

The pieces are done completely digitally. I spend a good amount of time sketching and refining in photoshop before I start painting. A neat trick I use all the time is flipping your canvas horizontally so that you can see you piece with fresh eyes. 

From there, I just start painting and screwing around until I get on a path that’s working. There’s a point you reach while working(About 50% of the way through) that you think ” Wow, this just looks terrible.” But keep working and pushing pass that, I have to remind my self to do that each time! You’ll be a lot happier with it the more to keep pushing and fixing certain areas that just feel “funny ” to you. 

Share your work with friends or instructors if you feel something is just too off and you can’t pin point it, they’ll usually be able to see it right away and help you out. 

After the piece is all said and done. I’ll throw some light adjustments layers on top of everything to brighten it up because I find I naturally use a very dull pallet when I paint. 

That’s about it! I use a lot of custom brushes when painting instead of those standard ones that come with photoshop. 

Visit http://digitalbrushes.tumblr.com/

and start downloading some and play around!

Hope that helped, thank you for your ask!

Here’s an example of some thumbnails and rough sketch for the Falkor piece. As you can see, I didn’t end up using it but you have to get the bad ideas out first before you find the good ones. 

Edit: Materials used: Wacom intuos Pro and Photoshop CS5