PAINT A COLOURFUL FANTASY PORTRAIT

Grace Zhu, a full-time artist and instructor at Syn Studio Concept Art School, paints a regal portrait scene full of light, colours and flowers

- Grace Zhu

Fantasy illustrations are the perfect opportunity for artists to explore the magical, otherworldly and delightful. Despite the genre’s many clichés, there remain innumerable ways to have fun with your fantasy art. In this workshop, I’ll describe my process for generating a colourful fantasy portrait from scratch.

During my career I’ve painted many fantasy and sci-fi portraits for various indie games, book covers, short films and more for a variety of clients such as Clip Studio Paint and FairyLoot. I’ve even appeared in previous editions of ImagineFX!

The workshop will feature the key steps of my fantasy portrait creation process including the ideation phase, research and reference gathering, and colour and theme selection, among others. Taken together, they will help you create portraits that convey the classic feeling of fantasy and strikes an immediate chord with the viewer.

In addition, I’ll also describe the Photoshop tools and painting techniques that will help you generate high-quality fantasy portraits that accurately convey the magical vibe that’s typically seen in the subject area.

I hope that this month’s tutorial will provide you with the creative spark to produce your own fantasy portraits, full of life and colour.

1 Visualise the Queen of the Fields

I start with just getting an idea down on paper, starting with just a pose for the character, and adding in a few sketchy lines to indicate hair, clothing and the bouquet. I make a mood playlist for this and get cosy – painting a lush, verdant image isn’t easy in the dead of winter in Canada!