1.) INITIAL PLANNING AND TAKING IDEAS:

Many times, more than the drawing itself, what is more complicated when making an illustration is the idea that you want to transfer, the theme of the month is about designing demons, monsters and creatures of your country or region, in my case Spain.

The first thing I thought of was the cuélebre, a creature from the mythology of the León and Cantabria regions, but I wanted to do something more widespread, so I finally opted for the theme of witches, the coven and demonic invocations.

 

2.) TAKING REFERENCES AND PREVIOUS SKETCHES:

To start making sketches, the first thing I did was study the iconography of the covens, and everything led to Francisco de Goya.

 

Goya in his black paintings and engravings on witchcraft always uses the image of the goat to represent the devil, so I started from that base and looked for photographs of it on the internet.

 

To give it a more terrifying aspect and to leave my style in the drawing, I decided that the goat had an anthropomorphic aspect, the head of a ram, but a human body. I decided in a first step that the demon would come out of a bonfire in a ghostly way ... but when squaring the illustration, my intention was to adopt a panoramic format, a format that I use whenever I want to tell a story with my drawings, and it lost strength and definition, so that I finally only represented ghostly flares around the demon figure.

 

The main character's expression I wanted to be that of someone waking up from a long sleep ... angry.

 

Regarding the people who do the invocation in the initial sketches I wanted to mix several things:

 

1) People with little culture, we are talking about representing people from the 18th-19th century, poor and who resort to superstitions and obscurantism to solve their problems.

2) The expressions: In my illustration I try to show a group of people who have been trying to make a coven without result for a long time and who finally succeed, so the expressions range from madness, surprise, terror and regret .

The place where the coven is held is inside a cave.

 

3.) ENTINTANDO:

Inking is one of the processes that I enjoy the most, in this case, and starting from my own drawings, I do the most work of definition at this point, and I finish it off in coloring. The sketches are mere references that help me for compositional purposes.

 

I like inking without much help, for this I have used the real G brush with stabilization at level 6, trying to play with the masses of black in the clothes and backgrounds.

 

The inking layer is locked to color the lines in certain parts of the drawing (specifically flares).

4.) COLOR:

The color in the illustration has been somewhat complex, I have tried to play with a very bright light bulb (the campfire and the demon) that illuminates all the members of the coven creating dark clearings, and I have separated the background with blue tones and the first shots with reddish tones, obscuring the character in the foreground.

I have separated in a layer the flat color of all the main characters, and I have divided the background colors into several layers, thus I manage to treat each plane separately by giving it a specific color and lighting, in the case of fire I have made some gradients with the lasso tool and airbrush.

 

5.) FINAL TOUCH-UPS:

Once I have all the flat colors given way to working with the shadows, in two different layers, a first with blue tones (general) and a second with reddish tones (details). These Shadows applied to backgrounds and characters.

For the highlights I have used a layer in Add mode (brightness) and another in Dodge mode (brightness), the two above the layer of inks to affect the total of the illustration, and the Add (brightness) one below the two layers of shadows in multiplication mode to respect the shadows.

In the upper layers I have put a layer in raster mode with blue colors and I have duplicated it in multiplication mode, the purpose of these two layers is to separate the outer background (branches, clouds and moon) and create an effect of distance from the interior of the cave.

In upper layers I have put details, coloring over the inks the outline of the demon and spark effects with the Droplets airbrush, which I have then blurred with the radial blur filter (filters tab).

To finish the illustration I have created a layer in darken mode with an earthy tone that affects the entire illustration, but I have erased certain areas to highlight the effects of the fire.

I have created a hard blend mode layer that sits on top of all the layers with a very low opacity, which brings out the highlights.

Finally, I have created two correction layers (layers- layer in correction mode) that I have placed in different areas by modifying Hue / Saturation / Luminosity, and a correction layer in Color Balance mode. All of them are to adjust the color values to my liking.

 

And this is the final result…. I also leave you all the explanations in the video that I have made on my channel. I hope you like it. Greetings from Tito Jud!