New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Fan Art ... and how I did it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan art by Daniel Grant Newton (DGN Productions). Characters include Leonardo, Donatello, April O'Neil and Casey Jones.  Daniel does not own these characters or have any rights to them.

Hey there, hope you had a wonderful Easter weekend.  If you do not celebrate the day, and do not worship rabbits who bring chocolate eggs, then I hope you enjoy had a relaxing time away from work all the same.

Perhaps you were reading my book Don't Shoot the Messenger?  Well, if you were, thank you, but possibly a bit sacrilegious considering the content.

Anyway, today I thought I'd share with you some fan art I created for a TMNT fan art competition I was invited to enter on Deviant Art.  I also thought I'd give you a behind the scenes look at how I create digital art like this, as I've done with my paintings previously.

So here I go.

First step I take when creating digital art is to sketch out a drawing in my pad, in this case the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with April and Casey.  Often I do not give it any shading, as I plan to do that in Photoshop, but this time I did shade it.  Also, usually I draw a background, but this time I decided I'd create that in Photoshop.  Below is the initial sketch.

Step two I scan or take a photo of this drawing and put it into Photoshop.  If I have drawn it with a pacer, and not proper graded art pencils or charcoal, I will turn the contrast up.  Then I'll fix any mistakes, like Casey Jones' arm and stretching the picture ever so slightly.  And in this case, as there is no background, I will cut out the background.  I did however leave a little of the background this time to look like sewer mud and sludge being flung everywhere.

Step three I create a duplicate layer of the characters and make it 'colour overlay'.  This gives me an outline of what I have drawn, and means I can now create layers under that to colour in.  I actually create a layer for each part so that if I want to manipulate or delete just the one section or colour, it won't affect the rest of the picture.  I also create the background using shapes and filter effects.

Step four time to create lighting and atmospheric effects.  In the picture below you can see I have added rain, made the mud look like mud, and added dramatic lighting.  This lighting is either a foot soldier or police spotlight or flashlight that has been cast from the right (out of shot), or a flash of lightening in the storm that is brewing.  The rain was created with angled boxes or various sizes and transparency levels, and a transparent haze around the characters and ground where the rain hit solid objects.  The lighting layer goes on top of the colour overlay layer.  And you get the final result...

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.  If you did, please let me know in the comments, or write to me at danielgrantnewton (AT) gmail (DOT) com, and I'll do more for you.

Your pal, Dan.

P.S. So you don't miss out on any more cool art I post, put your email into the box at the top right of this page and click subscribe like a boss ... like the boss at the end of a level.