Christian Ward uses digital art software such as Photoshop to create beautiful illustrative portraits of both men and women. Featured below are several Photoshop portraits by this digital artist.
Working in a program like Photoshop allows the artist to work quickly and confidently, because mistakes can be solved with the undo function or simply deleted. The layer tool in digital art software allows Photoshop artists to build up a painting by adding more layers to the design, in a similar way to the way that a painter will add more layers of paint to a canvas. Painters who work with paint and brushes must mix their colors before applying the paint, but in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter, the artist can edit the colors at any time during the creation process. Changing the overall color effect of a painting is called grading, a technique that is often used in film to create a visual expression of the mood set in the scene. Christian Ward has chosen not to grade his paintings, instead allowing the art to stand as raw creativity posed on stark backgrounds.
Christian Ward’s digital portraits contain vivid colors and animated lines that give the paintings a sense of life and personality. Although the portraits are rendered in a similar art style, each painting is unique in its symbolism. These symbolic shapes and colors have been chosen to represent an aspect of each girl’s personality. For example, in one of the portraits the girl is in the process of eating a tiny man, a symbol of promiscuity. Another girl is covered in stars, a symbol that has been used to mark that something or someone is special or talented. There is a sense of love in each portrait, as though the artist is currently in love with the girl or once loved her dearly and now suffers a broken heart in the wake of a relationship with the woman in the portrait.
For more digital illustrations by Christian Ward, visit his online art portfolio.
