David Hellman

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did a painting for the Darkstalkers Tribute book that came out recently. We weren’t supposed to talk about it, and then we were, and I wasn’t sure when it was okay, and I just forgot about it.

But here it is:

For those who don’t know, this is a character from a popular series of fighting games. Pretty sure he’s a vampire. The book has a lot of vampires, as well as mummies. There are also a lot of sexy girls, because undead things are sexy.

Also! When the poster shop opens in the near future, a limited run of these will be available for purchase!

To make this blog post slightly more interesting, I thought I’d share some of the rough drafts. In the original sketch, the guy was more weird looking:

I fixed that and started to block in the color. Certain major aspects of the composition hadn’t been thought up yet. In particular, I later added bright stuff around the edges to create “boundaries” that keep your eye moving around inside the picture.

When I’m painting in Photoshop and feel myself starting to get cautious, I start a new layer so that I can paint over my existing work without fear of messing anything up irretrievably. Here’s the last layer of additions, isolated from what was under it.