My name is James Child. I am a freelance artist from the UK. I started to learn to paint basics at 36. I am 42 to now and still working and studying at improving every day. 

It's never too late to learn something new or follow your passion. 

Not to sure what direction my art is going but my main focus is learning and improving and seeing where to journey takes me.

I decided to pick the hero class. I started by doing sketches with not much in mind just seeing what came up. I wanted a dynamic movement with a low camera angle.

Once I have the sketch decided I added another layer and begin a second layer of sketching looking for interesting shapes for the characters anatomy and just play around. Once happy with the sketch I refined with better line art and/or paint and work that way.

I did some reference hunting and quick color sketches. They're very ugly but fast and quick ways to test out color palette.

I wanted to pick colors to match sea creatures to help the character fit into his background.

Happy with the work done I started on the main illustration. It was under water so I googled some underwater scenes to reference for inspiration. I also gathered some references for the characters main features (creature based) and for his weapon and other details. 

I started with a mid-tone background with some texture and started painting the character, focusing on the anatomy. Here is an example of the spear arm hand reference.

I added some background and areas of light and dark for contrast. The lightest part halos the character's head to draw focus on the main point of interest. I like to have many areas of contrast- light on dark and dark against light etc. I was not happy with the face so I repainted it many times.

I needed to add a secondary element to the painting and display his power to control sea creatures with glowing eyes. At this point, everything is in place and I just slowly render and adjust the painting. I use a mixture of texture, soft and hard brushes and the smudge brush to shape. I used it with the spacing turned off to smooth and blend.

I used one layer for the background, one layer for the character and a foreground layer. I created many hues and shift from light to dark and hard to soft edges. In the shadows, I lessened the details/info and used the light to draw attention where I want it to. The closer I got to finishing I created finishing references. This is normally one or two paintings that has the quality or style I am aiming for. It helped create better work as it gave me something to aim for.

I added more details and took the painting to finish. At this point, I tried different adjustment layers like saturation or contrast to see what works the best, kind of fine-tuning the image. Once done I thought about what I could have done better or how I could have done things easier. I felt like I should have put more time in the drawing and design stages before starting the painting but it is done and so I move on with the lessons learned.

That is the making of Soteriar.

You can find James Child's Twitch Stream here.