Being Creative With Realism: Fantasy Paintings!

If you have followed all the lessons on this site in order (and I know you have!), you will find that a lot of the material I covered comes together in this section. Hence, congratulations on building your foundation of realism that deals with all sorts of subjects and combining it through the digital medium!

You have touched on the human form, the natural world, and the animals that live within it. It's time to put it all together and build your own fantasy world!

1. Fantasy races and classes

To start off easy, fantasy paintings involve different types of races. Some of these races have natural enemies as well as friends. The easiest is the human race. Then, you can expand on it to create elven races, goblin races, undead races, etc.

Even more so, think about body structure. Ogres have massive body structures that you can construct based on your knowledge of human anatomies. On the other side, you can paint imps, which have slender and smaller body types.

Do not forget about classes either! Depending on your character, he or she can be a magician, warrior, thief, paladin, priest, etc.

With those classes, the focus is on the clothing mostly. For example, plate versus cloth. Though nothing is set in stone, try to be creative while still giving your characters that class look that they need.

2. Winged creatures

The most common types of fantasy paintings involve creatures with wings. Some examples are angels, Valkyries, pixies, and fairies. Depending on your preferences, even mermaids can have fins that are shaped as wings.

Armed with your knowledge of the human form and painting birds, you can create your own winged creature with ease. From there, you can move to more advanced beasts such as demon hunters, dragons, harpies, and the mythical phoenix.

Each of these has its own challenging aspect ranging from scales to an aura of flames. Compete with what you know and create new techniques to give your winged creatures life!

3. Fantasy landscapes

Fantasy paintings takes various elements of real landscapes and twists it to fit the desired atmosphere. Most elements are skewed out of proportions, such as overgrown trees or colossus monuments, to give a feeling of grandeur.

Even building structures can exist in huge complexities and in areas that are not usually seen, or rarely seen, in the real world. At the same time, relate the environment to your characters.

You don't see a mermaid on a forest floor, for example! Again, since there is no one rule to abide by, use your own judgment to make sure your imagination does not run too wild!

4. Fantasy weapons

Weapons take a lot of imagination and design work for fantasy paintings. You want to cater the weapons to the character races and design languages. For example, an elven design will have curved gold edges while dwarfs will have square edges.

Eve the materials can be different. Humans can use elaborate metal designs while an ogre will use just simple wood and stone. It really depends on what the race is capable of.

A simple weapon to start off can be the sword. You can move onto more elaborate weapons such as scythes, daggers, hammers, pole arms, etc, depending on what your setting needs. You can even start working on vehicles such as catapults!

At the end of the day, designing weapons might not make use of our organic lessons, but it does take a lot of skill in using your digital art tools to make something that is quite logical.

If you're comfortable, move on ahead and show us your stuff! Just use the form at the bottom and let your fantasy paintings take center stage as it becomes a mini-page on this site!

Return from Fantasy Paintings to the 2d Digital Art Guide.

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