First artwork of 2022! This is my depiction of Jin Gitaxias from MtG plane of Phyrexia. The idea of creating this came from my friend and agent Alper Markov (check his great YT channel on MtG here: https://bit.ly/3qXDYBH ).

It is veri important piece to me, as it rekindled my love with oil paints. Enough talk, here is Jin! (process below ;-)) 

Here's my process of creating this painting. I usually start with rough sketches and thumbnails. This time I quickly got on the idea of Jin emerging from some kind of shadowy vault, after some kind of hard experience (like a battle or binge watching all seasons of Deep Space Nine).

After figuring out what was in shadow and what was in light I drafted a detailed sketch. It is mostly Derwent 4B pencil and some black crayon for deep shadows. A3 copy paper. 

After finishing a sketch, I took a photo of it, straightened it a bit in photoshop and printed at the same A3 size to begin transfer onto primed board. I prime a HDF board with 5 to 6 coats of gesso, sanding it between each coat to get super smooth painting surface.

Now, time to paint! I started with acrylic underpainting to figure out some forms, and than begun working in oils. I tend to put very thin layers of oil, so my process is somewhat long. I work on whole picture jumping from place to place, so I don't have to wait for oil to dry on a single form to finish it.

At this point i begun working on side walls (I had this idea of covering it with some phyrexian glyphs). I also had to figure out the light on Jin's shiny and very complex shaped head. It is like two joined and smoothed out, bent cones made of living metal! I had no similar object to catch the reference, so I made a simple scene in Cinema 4D.

Overall, it took me about 40 hours to paint this one within multiple sittings. I'm happy I did it, as it came out pretty nice and I had an opportunity to solve a plethora of problems in different stages as well to learn a lot from it. I'm definitely staying with oils from now on.

Thanks for getting down here! As a little extra, here are some detail shots!