Digital painting in Photoshop

In this tutorial would be really recommended a Wacom tablet but it is not needed. You need some basic understanding of traditional paiting too.

Here is a rough skecht, I used a photo of a muscleman like reference, the face obviously is a cartoon. It dont have to be perfect... its only a guide. You can transform the original skecht in Photoshop to get exactly the proportions you like.

I added other layer and I filled the selection with a medium brown. I used a light brown to get the highlight. At this step we are a quick painting to see how the differents mucles looks... its really helpfull if you use hard brushes with low opacity (around 20%).

Much better if you change the background color to a medium gray, so you have a neutral enviroment.

At this step I used a soft brush with low opacity and the smudge tool... now it have to looks smooth.

Now you can delete the black stroke layer and clean the borders around the body with the eraser.

I never do things in the same way... at this time I decided our muscles are too desaturated.

I duplicated the color layer and I put it in overlay mode to get more saturated colors.

Now you can use a white-yellowish color to make the highlights, I used a soft brush with low opacity (this step is the key of the illustration).

We only did some small changes and add the face.

Finished !!