Greg Rutkowski dragon inspired painting

Starting off the Third semester I thought I would look at learning how to add crowds and people into a scene. I found a tutorial on Gumroad by Greg Rutkowski. He's an artist I've been following for a while who also paints in a loose style with various pieces (although he paints tighter images for client work usually) similar to John J park who I learnt from.

I've attempted to paint crowds in the past before but sometimes they feel too time consuming and fall flat. I've been looking for a way to speed this process up as crowds or extra people in the scene tend not to be a main focal point so it seems counter productive every time I paint a concept that i'll have to paint a large group of people in.

That leads me onto the tutorial I discovered from Greg Rutkowski. This tutorial was actually useful for two lessons I've been wanting to learn a bit about. As well as painting crowds effectively I've wanted to learn more about the mixer brush. Craig Mullins who is considered as one of the original users of using Photoshop to digitally paint attended a demo/talk in Paris where he was using the mixer brush to create a landscape. He talked about how he came from a traditional oil painter background as digital painting wasn't a thing when he started in the industry, but when using the mixer brush it gave him more of that traditional feeling he's used to. The mixer brush has the ability to be able to select how dry the brush is or how loaded with paint it is. I was interested in learning this further as I aim to paint loose and traditional looking and learning this brush option and it's settings could help that further. In the tutorial however the brush was used more tactically for time saving. Greg used it as a stamp tool and sampled images from it to get textures and colour helping to speed up the process. This allowed him to quickly build up a scene full of people.

I painted the image at the top of this post as my first attempt at using the brush in the way that Greg does. As it's a piece to test and learn from I kept a similar subject matter to what was shown in the tutorial in order to help ease into it. It definitely sped up my process when painting large groups and the mixer brush will be something I continue to use and learn.