This is my second entry for the “XP Pen Reconstructed Masterpiece” contest. While looking for famous masterpieces I had seen the Napoleon painting before I had decided to paint the Van Gogh painting I made prior. I know I wanted to do something with this recreation, but I didn’t have an idea until this past weekend. I started with the motorcycle first which took the longest since I was mashing different motorcycles together until I arrived at this design. Next came Napoleon which went faster than I thought. I debated whether to have his face uncovered or at least his eyes, but decided to go with a closed helmet in the end. When I finally finished the background I was about to call it done but felt it needed something more when I was looking at the soldiers in the background. After some thought I decided to add a jet which fit perfectly in the blank space and to top it off, also merged well with Napoleon’s hand gesture.
Just a quick painting that I was sketching till it turned into this. At some point it looked like a set of armor so I decided to go with it. The base was started with the Real Tapered Wet Flat Brush and at some point I went over it with the Tapered Oils brush.
This is based on a drawing I did way back in (at least from a quick search) 2016. At the time I was completely new to digital painting or using colors really. I was more into drawing and was really struggling with color. I seriously thought I could bypass that issue by focusing on the values using my pencil and then hoping that Photoshop would deal with the colors on it’s own. Of course, nothing is ever that easy.
I can proudly say I have made some progress in the last 4 years.
I used the line art as a quick map of how I wanted to set up the painting, but overall the line art would be left out. Once I had some reference photos of how castles and the sky could look like I began painting. I started with the castle first and that took me a while since I kept working with the way I believed the shadows would look in my scenario. But I made the mistake of not painting the sky so I could figure out what colors I would eventually end up using. With a bit more experience I should be able to figure this out in a couple of minutes but setting up the lighting for the background took me a couple of hours. Once I was satisfied with what I had, I then began working on Lelouch. But since the colors for the background were dealt with, getting his colors was much easier. Dealing with him did have to be finished today though. I want to be fast enough to paint something like this in at least one day, but for now it is taking about two days. For this painting I decided to use the spray paint for the sun’s lighting and in some sections of the clouds and the castle. I seriously should use it more since it made the effect I wanted much easier.
My brother has recently started watching Code Geass for the first time, so when I asked him for a suggestion of course Code Geass would be the option. I figured that would be a good excuse to retry doing this painting.
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