Hello, my name is Pavel Galavi, I am an illustrator and game concept artist. This time I will be painting a sketch of a horseman. You can think of it as a preparational work for some illustration. To create that sketch, I will be using Coral Painter Essential 7. I start with a line drawing on a separate layer, using the basic crayons. At this point I am trying to recapture the movement of both horse and rider and find the right proportions and posture. I imagine it to be a character from the 19th century, maybe a Kozak from the Caucasus region. Someone who could be a character from Leo Tolstoy stories. So he is wearing that large her head and a coat and he is armed. Drawing a mounted character requires some specific experience. In the past I have invested some time in learning horse anatomy and did a number of sketches of these beautiful animals trying to explore the proportions, shapes and movement. That was extremely helpful practice. But still when drawing a horse, I do that much by trial and error. To adjust the proportions I use lesser selection tool and transformation tool to move and tweak part of the drawing. Once I am happy with the overall direction defined by the line drawing, I can start painting. Under the layer with the line art I create another one and start my under painting there. First I need to indicate the light and dark areas and overall color palette of the image. For this I am using the clumpy brush, the one that walks well with a mixer pad. The combination of the bristle brushes and the mixer pad adds a lot of variety to your brush work. When you pick up a paint from the mixer pad, the bristles of the brush are colored unevenly. This effect is clearly visible on the character's fur hat. The yellowish and slightly greenish shade are both parts of the same brush stroke. I am setting up the layer for the background and though I don't intend to do anything elaborate about it, I need to indicate some basement for the horse man. If you stroke hinting on a grass and the pathway should be enough for that. I am still not happy about how the riders seated. So I continue tweaking proportions and posture by moving parts of the image. Fortunately the digital medium allows me to do that in a non-destructive way. I want the posture of that man to be more relaxed as if he is returning back home after some duties and feels confident and safe enough. So I have straightened his leg a bit. The general palette of the image is already set up and now I am trying to find colors for smaller areas of the image, like sleeves, trousers and so on. Each detail should be in harmony with the whole image. Some areas should pop out first, other areas can be a second read. In this case I think his head and his torso and the area with his arm and rifle should be the first read. Once I feel more confident about the hierarchy of the image, I zoom in a bit and start painting details. I do not try to paint every piece of fur on his head or paint every facial feature. Instead I am trying to give the view by a sense of an object, just enough information to read and recognize it. If my task was to create a larger image, then I would probably spend more time on that and pushed the details to the next level. But in general I prefer to keep my art more leconic. It is very important to pay a special attention to the edges of the object being painted. This affects how a human eye reads shape and material of an object. As an example you can look at his shoulder area. At some point the edge of the shoulder softens, almost blurring with the background. This gives an illusion that the surface of his shoulder changes and starts facing upward, moving deeper into the imaginary canvas plane. You can see the same around his knee area. The front edge of his hip is almost blurred, while the front edge of his shin is very pronounced. If all edges of the object are equally pronounced, then our eye perceives that as a flat object. I continue adding details and carefully injecting some color shades for vibrance. Blending of brush strokes works very naturally in painter. It behaves much like the real traditional medium. New brush strokes are delicately used with the paint that is already on the canvas. At this stage I use much wider variety of brushes than when I was doing under painting. I have a set of my favorite brushes that I have placed on a custom palette for easy access. One of my favorites is a loaded palette knife. I love it for its great color blending and transparency control. I use it constantly during the mid and later stages of my work. Another favorite is the real wet brush. It is great for softer edges and hairy materials. Also considering this is a bristle brush, it works well with a mix of pad. I also love all the brushes that respond to paper grain. That paper grain allows you the creation of various textures and complex color combinations right on your canvas. His hand holding a pipe is a good example of approach to details. There is no need to render every finger on his hand. Instead I am trying to recapture the gesture of his hand in general. Finishing a artwork can be as challenging as starting it. It always seems that there is something that needs improvement. At some point I stopped to understand if those changes and adjustments I do are really improvements. A good approach in that case would be to take a break, preferably till next date, and then have a fresh look at your picture. In most cases after the break I can clearly see what was done right and what is wrong and I can adjust accordingly. I have put some orange color accents of his dress and removed orange from the saddle. That way I tried to shift the primary focus more toward the rider. For now I think I am done with that image. I hope you enjoyed watching the painting process and found this video useful. Thank you for watching and goodbye.