The Harpy Celaeno: Part 2 (Branches )

Using the stencil tool, I created my own by

finding a picture of a branch on the Internet and then editing it so its a solid black and white image. Problem with the stencil tool is that it's hard to control, you can't resize the stencil- you have to zoom in/out the image until it fits the stencil (as that remains the same size when its placed down - but changes with the image to zoom/rotation ect.) After laying three branches on separate layers I erased and added forks so the branches don't look the same before using the Palette Knife to fuzz the edges, making it look as if the paint is bleeding into a wet surface. Merging all these branches together into one layer I lowered the opacity down a bit.

The foreground branch needed to be more detailed and this time I needed to make a "Mask" out of a stencil so I could use long brush strokes and not worry about it "Going out the lines". Quickly hiding all the layers apart from the basic black painted base of the branch I create a file as before (solid black and white) and got it to the right size. The Brush tool is fluid to use, with the Auto-Clean off the colours react to each other as long strokes go over the surface.

However, it didn't look "woody" enough and a bit plastic. So I got some reference and used the Pencil tool to emphasise edges and groves. The Pencil also added some grainy texture.

This is all I'm going to do to the background at the moment. I'll come back to it as the painting progresses. However, before I even got started on the Harpy herself I needed to make yet another stencil/mask. This time, as the shape was complex, I opened Photoshop and used the mask tool and filled the area with black. It's now all ready for the Brushes to play!