Painting Ears

A short demonstration of painting ears.

1. First I layer in my major shapes with broad strokes. It's important to get good color variation even from the start. I used a big brush and only hit major forms. If you squint, the first and last steps look fairly similar.
2. A bit more details, but still mostly large changes. No smoothing yet, just picking up existing colors and adding new ones where appropriate.
3. I focus more on rounding and softening forms that were not as harsh as others. It's good to have hard square transitions as well as round soft ones, for contrast.
4. I use the smudge brush sparingly to smooth out and blend some areas.
5. I sharpen up the final areas and push the forms to be as readable as possible.

Various ears I have painted. Ears can have a ton of variation and getting the details right on the ear will help sell your final product. These were painted at their true resolution and show that you can achieve good looking ears even with only small texture areas to work with.