Angler Fish Speed Paint

I try my hand at speed painting every so often, I really ought to do it more. It's a great way of getting your hand and your eye used to getting down basic shapes and colors and ideas really fast, so the picture is more unified with a better and more gestural composition.

This was a really fast one that I clocked in as finished at 55 minutes.

Angler Fish by Chase Restrepo

• This is no particular species, I just used two misc references that had colors I liked, so I picked those out and got to work.
• I made a black canvas to start on. A lot of people prefer to use a midtone rather than the darkest dark right off the bat, that would have worked too.
• I then started laying down a vague shape of the fish in a very light brown, and planned my light source(which is pretty obvious and straight forward in this one)
• I built up to lighter and lighter shades of brown until I got up to a point where I felt comfortable adding the light blue highlights. I highlighted the bioluminescent appendage with a soft brush set to "screen mode" to set how bright I wanted the strongest light to be(this helps me make sure the highlights don't outshine the actual light source)
• After all the lighting was done, I went bak in with smaller brushes and added texture to places like the fin, and around the edges of the fish where it would catch the light rolling off of it.
• The final steps I took were adding some floating detritus in the water around the fish with a really small brush, and I set a texture over the whole thing. Minimal color adjustments were made after that.

Media: Photoshop, basic brushes
Time Taken: 55 minutes
Made in: October 2010