Concepting a Horror Illustration in Photoshop

In this course we’ll start talking about what we find scary and how to scare ourselves in order to brainstorm ideas. Eventually, gathering some inspiration from other horror artists and looking at scary imagery, we’ll start to create a small story used as reference for our design. Once this is done we’ll open up Photoshop and paint a 100 percent black silhouette using abstract shapes. We’ll then use the lighten mode with just a single color as much as possible to flesh out from the blackness of the silhouette the anatomy of the figure. Once the figure is finished and polished, we’ll use it as reference for my main design which will be a paintover for our final image.

In this course we'll break down and work to understand what the word “scary” really means. We'll discuss ways to create a small story before starting the design. As we begin painting, we'll start by using a black silhouette as a base. We'll then use Photoshop to create the digital sketch using different modes (lighten, darken, color dodge etc) Finally, after covering techniques and methods for painting, we'll have created a cinematic-looking and disturbing figure that could be used as reference or concept for films and games