ZBrush, Keyshot, Photoshop & Painter CREATE SURREAL PORTRAIT ART

Ken Coleman explains his “rinse wash repeat” approach to surreal portraiture using 3D models, textures and brushes

- Ken Coleman

In this workshop, I’ll show you how I create my artwork using my own photos, 3D models, and custom brushes. The workshop uses ZBrush and Keyshot for creating 3D models and rendering. Most of the image’s shape and composition is built in Photoshop with blends of images, textures, and brush strokes.

This process starts with simple shapes that are repeated, flipped, and rotated to build out the artwork and find more abstract shapes to fill in the composition. I start in ZBrush, making basic spiral shapes that resemble organic elements such as horns and branches. I then render these in Keyshot with three layers to create light, depth and shadow.

These iterations are then saved as Photoshop files with a transparent background, so they can be dragged into the main composition to build up the overall silhouette.

Once I’m happy with the overall shape of the composition, I’ll bring it into Painter and use blender brushes such as Fractured blender and Stencil oily blender to break it up into an abstract painting on multiple layers. Once I’m happy with the overall textures and abstract shapes here, I move the image back and forth between Painter and Photoshop using masks and adjustment layers to finalize the shapes, tones, and details, bringing the artwork to completion.

1 Finding inspiration at home

My son Luke has become one of the main inspirations of my personal work, and I often shoot images of him early in the morning when bed hair and morning light make a great combination. The main elements I use to start one of my personal works are a strong subject, stock photos of props, abstract 3D elements, and images of textures and particles that I create myself.

2 Prepping the image