Myles to go....

My latest digital painting adventure.

As a last gasp of visual arts created by human hands in the digital medium gets laid to rest, I figured I’d make this post to explain my process since a few old friends asked.

So this is how the creative process works for me.... (see the end for the results)

I scroll social media all day like most. The algorithm sends me stuff I am interested in... music being one of them. Mostly articles and concert pix of musicians I admire etc. When I see a picture I like; usually a unique angle or lighting, I save it to my “cool ideas” folder. Sometimes it’s just weird bug or animal or anything that I think looks cool. Even sometimes an artist’s technique. It’s mostly a completely disorganized (cool.jpg, coolbird.jpg or whatever....) group of files that I will never use again!

I was rummaging through the crap in there looking for some old personal pictures (I have many terabytes of storage) and I came across this low res picture of Myles Kennedy (the hardest working man in showbiz) from ‘17 (Thank you https://www.facebook.com/lightsactionphotos). And an even lower resolution picture of this nuclear cooling tower from 2013.

I thought, this could work nicely together. The plan was to “photo bash” this combo. If it was just for some low res online stuff it was a couple hrs of silhouetting and comping. But my plan was to do something high resolution enough to print a large poster. So I started to look for some guitar reference or a higher res version of the LightsAction.photos.... couldn’t find anything online except this high res shot taken from another angle from that exact same gig.... probably only milliseconds before or after!
So this gave me some of the details I needed to draw from.

I didn’t know what kind of guitar this was so, I asked Ian Thornley, a good friend of Myles, and a guitar aficionado extraordinaire, what guitar this was. It is a PRS 594, but it has a unique knob configuration.... I found some reference.

Next, I purchased an inexpensive 3D model of a similar guitar style from Turbosquid.

It was the basic PRS, but needed quite a bit of modification in 3D to match the shape and components of the 594. Once the general layout of the hardware was in place I then I had to match the camera angle and lens distortion of the original photograph.

The basic render gives me some positions, shapes, shadows, reflections and surfaces to paint the hard surface components. I take the cues and subtleties from the feel of the original photo.

I recently purchased a subscription to an AI program called PromeAI. I am just discovering it’s capabilities and limitations. I upscaled the background picture of the cooling tower and expanded it beyond it’s original cropping. The AI capability to do this is INCREDIBLE! This allowed me to focus my efforts on Myles.

I now had all the raw pieces I needed to start painting in Photoshop.

I use a 24” Cintiq screen tablet to physically/manually “paint” pixels.

That’s when the painting begins. I adjust the color palette from an adjusted version of the original and the other references I have. All this shortens the time it takes and makes up for the skills I lack, that an experienced artist in the physical medium has to do an illustration like this. All told I probably spent 50-60 hours on this project. It would take me a year with traditional medium!

All that to say, that I enjoy the process. It’s comforting to dive into a project and concentrate. I don’t find the time or inspiration to “paint” much. Probably only 2-3 times a year. It gets me a lot of likes and good will in the social media space and I do appreciate that. I think as an artist/illustrator I have been blessed with the ability and the time/imagination to create something that is entertaining at least to me and THAT I think is cool. What’s REALLY cool, is that all the glory goes to God!

Credit:
Myles Kennedy
https://myleskennedy.com/

Lights Action Photo
https://www.facebook.com/lightsactionphotos

PromeAI
Photoshop
Wacom
Turbosquid