Making Of the "Golden Panda" by Kirsi Salonen

This is a quick step by step explanation of “Golden Panda,” a digital painting I did recently. If the character looks familiar it’s because you have seen him before in my piece entitled, “You Sang to Me,” which can be found in the It’s Art CG gallery. I liked this figure so much that I decided to reform a similar person again.

It took four days from this stage to the finalized picture you will see in the end.

Before I take you through the steps I must admit that I did not create this piece following any standard course of action, in fact I hardly planned the piece at all from the beginning.

Unfortunately, I didn’t save my original sketch so this picture is the earliest step I have; however, it doesn't differ much from a typical profile portrait image and figure drawing. Each of the key elements, eye, eyebrow, hair, mouth, water and tears, are on their own layers so they can be modified later. I used a black background because I wanted to highlight the figure and colors as much as possible and black served this purpose best. To create the water on his face I used a soft-edged brush in screen-mode with a very faint blue color. Then the transparency is achieved by erasing a bit of the center part of water and by adding bit of dodge to it instead. The dodge has to have a rough texture so the water looks like its shimmering.