Deadly Mistress Steps

This is my first serious picture using a tablet ("welcome to the 21st century, Dan!") and started out as a mere practice session to help me get a feel for my new pen. I feel like I handled a mouse pretty well all these years, but I now realise how much I've been holding myself back. The Graphire 4 is a low end tablet, but is a major step up from using a mouse. It took me some getting used to and I wanted to throw it out of the window to begin with, but after just a few days it feels so natural and makes digital painting so much easier and more fun.

Because this was intended to be a practice session to polish up on my technique, I decided to refer to a stock photo for my sketch. There are many people out there who condemn artists using any kind of reference, but there are way too many "doodlers" out there already, with great ideas and sloppy painting skills. My advice: put your ambitious motifs on hold until you have developed some core skills. Just be careful not to infringe on copyrights when using commercial references.

So then, the first step in this piece was to create a rough sketch. As the image is going to be created on a dark background, I decided to sketch with a light grey on a dark background with a small hard brush. I highly suggest sketching in a separate layer to the background here.

Some artists like to add a lot of detail and sketch in all the shadows and highlights, but I prefer to do that during the painting process, so I just wanted a basic outline. In previous tutorials I've demonstrated the grid method, which will help your proportion if this is something you struggle with. However, for this image I decided to work with the basic ruler guide instead.