The Finding

Hi everyone!
I like to mix it up so it's a much newer and different artwork today.

As usual in my personal works, I have a reason to make it aside of creating art I like. This time it was at the beginning of my Daz Studio time and I wanted to both figure out how far I can go with it, and also to create a more complex scene and to see how I solve this "problem" in Photoshop.

My main inspiration for this one was the 70s to 90s horror magazines like Creepy, which haven't always had the greatest treatment, but that had incredibly amazing and talented artists in their covers. If I ever get to that level I can die happy. :)

Here are some examples that I referenced and love:

When it comes to Daz and this kind of artwork where I don't really know where I'm going to go with, I generally first find and pose the models in Daz, and do a quick render.
Then I go to Photoshop and create the background, so I can determine what kind of light and colors the artwork will have.

When that's done, I go back to Daz and create the lighting environment as close to what I have on my background as possible, so I not only save time overpainting later, but also have an amazing reference for all characters then.

Here's a comparison from the final Daz Studio render to the final artwork:

The whole background was painted and I also painted over some of the 3D models to take away the always awkward 3D look. Especially faces generally are edging into the uncanny valley (where they look kind areal but something's clearly off) so I want to either repaint, enhance or directly blend a real face on top of it to take that away.

Anyway, I recorded this whole artwork process and I made a long ass YouTube video about it.
It was also the first time I ever added voiced commentary to my videos so even if I haven't gotten much better by now :D this one's even worse.
But, if you have trouble understanding me, I did curate the subtitles so they are 100% accurate.
Here's the video link if you want to check it out: