Creating Art for Mr. President
Brushstrokes & Algorithms: The Art of Digital Americana
When I had the chance to step-up and become the Art Director on Exia Lab’s first title, Mr. President, I quickly jumped into the opportunity. It seemed like a dream to me when I was approached by our CEO Jonathan Pan about creating Americana portraits and paintings. My love for the country that has opened up so many doors since coming from my native El Salvador. and the opportunity to create American-Style 1960’s art is nothing short of a dream come true.
For this portrait of a non-descript President, I used many references from different presidents of history, and since we are doing Americana, I wanted to take the iconic JFK portrait as a source of inspiration.
It first starts with a painter’s sketch. For key art, I sketch roughly the subject as I always did on my long portfolio graphic pads with charcoal, and I just draw it with Photoshop and custom pen brushes.
At this point nothing much changes, over the years I have amassed quite a bit of brushes in Photoshop, but I also have curated a lot.
I painted this by layering colors on the Canvas a traditional, but prompting nothing on Photoshop’s Generative Fill. This technique allows for the paint to sort of morph around your brush, giving you completely different results simulating a painted canvas texture (most notably seen on the side of the jacket) - where the imperfections become the art style, then you are free to polish as normal using the kind of brushes I have.
Notice how through the magic of Adobe’s Generative Fill for example, it saves me tons of time on having to paint (and repair) many brush strokes at once, and I can always see where and how I would paint it (or refine it if I choose) - for this portrait believe it or not, I went with the rougher version (top) because I did want some of the violent brushes there for the style, as opposed to the more tamed and clean (bottom).
For his face everything was painted by hand, with the brushes using the Generative Fill method, leaving my signature brush strokes on his face to give it that more classic portrait look.
Classic Americana Portrait of the President, which we of course as good artists paint on a separate layer against the background so we can then using the same method, paint his desk and papers behind it to deliver the final cover art. Final Artwork comprised of over 240 layers of digital oil paint.
One of the ways I like to approach my work is through the use of new technologies. I believe, generative AI technologies such as Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, and the ability to create my own visual models (and LorA’s), trained in my own style and locally run only in my Nvidia 5090 are the way to progress as a creative in this new world of art. Using ComfyUI and my models is also another in-painting technique and I have my own workflow, but - we will save that for a different day.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope this has been informative, as I will aim to keep this blog updated regularly with more behind-the-scenes, on how crafted we create our art here at Exia, using all the new technologies that we have available as creatives in this new era.
Until then - go paint and bring color into your life.
- Joshua Balcaceres
Studio Art Director
