The tougher the work the more we will enjoy,I have made digital Art for 2 years still it was hard for me. But after this Art, it was not. As you may all know now, I originally made digital illustrations and posted them on Instagram. In a long time, I hadn’t done mechanical illustrations. This time I was thinking of making a Superbike, but I did not know which one to do. I posted a survey on Instagram to find out what people loved. The poll included four major bikes by BMW, Ducati, Harley Davidson and Kawasaki. You might think “There were other bikes which were good!” Yes, I know but this was a random pick. There was a good response to that poll. The result was Harley Davidson live wire.
I was confused after collecting the references as to whether to calculate it (trace the outlines) or to do it freely. After an hour, after scribbling and sketching, I finished with a line of the drawing. I started doing it freehand and let my paint flow through the canvas. I was glad how it came out. I drew another line of work over the existing one to make it more detailed and to prevent confusions while painting. The sketch was complete and clean.
The real process starts from here. I started with freehand painting just going over the sketch without having a perfect form. I did the whole bike body and deleted the layer later because it wasn’t good. I did this mistake two times. As usual, I felt demotivated and went to youtube to search for inspiration. That is I searched how to colour a concept bike. In one of the video, he showed how to paint using a lasso/selection tool. I was too sceptical because it’s hard to get a smooth line using a lasso. Then I searched for how to use selections tools that is lasso, magnetic, square, circle and bezier selection tool effectively in Krita.
How I paint using selection tool?
I select an area for eg: If I am making a car I will select the window of the car and colour it so that the colour does not go out. I made a new layer for each part of the bike and coloured it. All these parts were in different layers so it was easy to come back and correct them later. The whole issue was with selecting the parts of the bike. In a selection, you can add a part by holding a shift and drawing the part you want to select. Similarly, you can hold the alt key to remove a part from the selection. It is good practice if in case you mess up.
After I coloured the pieces, about 20 such layers existed. I was not used to naming the layers the poor custom. Then I struggled to find the correct layer and correct it. The tiers of the bike were the most difficult for me to draw. It took me almost a day to figure out the scale of the tiers because even though I had a drawing, I didn’t think the proportions were correct. I was so down by the halfway point of the sketch that I couldn’t do something for an hour. I went back to YouTube and discovered an incredible man. Challa is the name of his channel. Within an hour or so, he was completing his Fiverr orders. I continued the work, After finishing a decent amount of progress I moved out of my chair.
Final touch
After completing the painting, I merged the layers and put another layer above it. I turned the layer style into multiply. The multiply layer darkens the colour below it so it’s easy to just take a big brush and run over the shadow areas. Adding the background was fun, just a few blue and white lines crossing each other. The ground was a mixture of dotted brush and a soft brush making it look like sand. And voila there it is my finished piece.
It took me 4 days to complete this art, I had a troublesome time imagining the perspective and lighting although I was using a reference It was exhausting. I had given up halfway. This was my hardest painting so far because it had many details to cover. I am happy with how it turned out it was worth it. I thank myself for not giving up.