Melody of a Bright Day - Walkthrough

This tutorial will take you through the creation of "Melody of a Bright Day". You can find the painting here. As in my previous walkthroughs I will try to guide you through the steps in this painting.

In this painting I again made a sketch on paper first. In fact, I made several. This piece involves a quite difficult and extreme perspective, and I feel much more comfortable with doing perspective setups on paper. I tried different settings, changed the perspective and tilted the image until I was satisfied. What you see is my final concept.
I had a pretty precise imagination of what the image was supposed to look like in the end, and what colours it should have, so no big trying around here, I quickly blotched in the colours, trying to get a good contrast here and decreased the opacity of the lineart, since it was only a rough guide anyway.
Here I finally got rid of my sketch layer, smoothened out the mess from before and started to define my lighting. You can see the strong highlights on the top of the curtains waves, and a soft shadow cast by the curtain on the wall. Plus I defined some lines and the corner of the room. I felt it looked wrong without a corner. A longer room would have required more windows, I guess. As you see I have also flipped the image, to check for mistakes, and to be more comfortable with drawing certain lines. Actually I flipped this painting a lot during its creation, I can only recommend this, makes things a lot easier.
Floor tiles. LOTS of floor tiles. A pain to paint, and quite some tedious work, I can tell you. The overall process was not difficult, though. I set up a few perspective guides for the tiles, painted them in, and after that went over them all again to give them a basic shading.
I worked more on the tiles, brightened them up, changed the contrast respectively to the lighting. As you might notice I completely repainted the piano, since my first one looked absolutely horrible. Only problem was that floor and piano had been on one layer, so I had to overpaint the piano with new tiles first, then sketch a new one. I looked at some references of several grand pianos to get the shape right this time.
A lot more refinement and detailing on the piano, and on the person. As you can see I painted the single strings, supporters and so on inside of the piano. I also added its feet and a shadow.
Big step, uh? Added the light rays, which add a lot to the atmosphere of the piece. I also revamped the reflection, which had been bugging me before. I got myself some mirroring materials and experimented a little to see how it would be right. I felt the bottom left corner looked a little blank, so I added another curtain there. Added some birds to convey a sense of freedom, and some reflections to give the tiles a more polished look. The painting is finally starting to look like something.
That is the final step. Basically it is a lot more refinement. I did not like the curtain, so I replaced it with a desk, some sheet music and other stuff. I also put some paintings onto the walls, which had looked too empty for my taste. The whole painting has been tightened up, refined, I made adjustments and colour corrections until I liked it. Well, and I hope so do you. We are done, enjoy the result.
Thanks to everybody who helped me along the creation with critiques and suggestions!
Just some detail shots for you!


Hope you found this walkthrough helpful, for more tutorials please visit my portfolio at http://www.dancakes.com. If you have any questions, be sure to drop me a mail at dan@dancakes.com

If you feel like supporting me a little, high quality prints of this and other paintings of mine are available at my store. If you are seriously interested in one of the larger prints, you can always email me and I will see if I can do something about the price ;)

This tutorial may not be published somewhere else without my permission!