Aggression

With my approach to digital painting, I apply what I know through a traditional perspective. I do this by using minimal amount of layers in Photoshop and treat the piece more as an actual painting. This method better makes my illustrations look more painterly and feel more energetic. Doing this lets me be more impressionistic while also being less fixated on having hundreds of layers.

With this piece specifically, I only had the background, the tiger, and the smoke effects on their own layer. When ever I do experiment or I'm unsure whether something will be affective in the piece, I will occasionally create more layers to play around with. Once I'm happy with how it looks I'll just merge them together and proceed further.