Out of all the projects this semester, this was the most challenging for me, because I have never painted vehicles. Most of the paintings I do on Photoshop are usually of people, creatures, and environment. I’ve painted metallic objects before like armors and swords but never vehicles, so I went on Google and got some vehicle reference and looked up some tutorial videos on painting vehicles. Once I had all the reference I needed, I began thinking of designs for the vehicle and started sketching them down on my sketch book. I decided on a fantasy spacecraft of some sort flying through space, but half way through the painting, I felt that the environment and the mood of the whole piece were kind of boring. I scraped the whole space thing and went on a different direction. At this time I was playing a lot of Call of Duty and got inspired to create a tank, but I didn’t want to do just a regular tank, I wanted to paint one with legs. The legs part was inspired by sc2 stalkers.
I started the painting like I usually do by dropping a background color to paint on. I wanted the setting to be on a desert in the afternoon, so I used light blue as a background color and painted bright beige on top for the ground. I created a new layer on top and sketched out my design, then made another layer on top of that to block in the shape of the tank with a really dark blue color. Once I have my silhouette of the tank, I start figuring out the lighting by adding mid tone colors and building my way up to the highlights. The hardest part of painting a vehicle was keeping the lines straight when I was rendering. I couldn’t do it, my hands were just not steady enough, and so I used the polygon lasso tool to keep the edges nice and crisp. Lasso tool ftw! Overall, I’m happy with the way it turned out.
