Psdtuts+ » Painting

Concept Art: Create a Sci-Fi Interior Using Digital Painting Techniques

Gavin L. — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:00:19 +0000

Artists often draw rough sketches of their artwork before they begin to add the final touches. This is also true for digital painters who will draw a rough sketch in Photoshop before they begin work. In today’s tutorial we will show you how to polish a rough sketch of a sci-fi drawing using digital painting techniques.

Note for Mac Users

Hotkeys containing “Ctrl” can simply be replaced by the “Command” button on a Mac version of Photoshop.

Step 1

It’s important to establish a good foundation to our concept, so lets lay out some perspective lines with the Brush Tool (B) on a (roughly) widescreen canvas. The canvas size is not important at the moment because we’re just roughing out a composition – sizes can be modified on the go. It’s often a good idea to draw line art on a New Layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) so we can separate the line art to everything else, such as the background. To keep things neat we can rename the layers by double-clicking the layer’s text in the Layers palette.

Step 2

The perspective seems to swallow everything to the right – not very effective for showing off a nice, tall interior. Let’s re-draw the perspective lines to give the floor fuller squares. This will give the illusion of a more top-down view, allowing us to convey deeper and more spacious architecture.

Step 3

Currently the image’s perspective is two-point. Adding a third, vertical perspective will give a composition a more dynamic feel and push for a vertigo look. Using multiple layers or painting everything on a single layer both have their own perks – experiment and see what works for you!

Step 4

To make it easier to see our sketch we can knock the line art’s opacity down in the layers palette. However, in the case of the example below where everything is merged into a single layer, we can use the Paint Bucket Tool (G) to fill in a neutral color on a New Layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) and pull the opacity back a little to see the line art underneath. Now we can begin sketching out our ideas on a new layer. If you need more room to paint, adjust the canvas size on the fly using the Crop Tool (C).

Step 5

As the piece already has a nice walkway as the main attraction, we need some sort of foreground element to set the distance and give the viewer some familiar grounding to be watching the walkway from. The canvas is also flipped using the Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Canvas Horizontal command. Flipping the canvas lets us see any mistakes that we may have been previously too zoned in to see. Now have a nice coffee break… Unless you’re hardcore, otherwise please proceed.

Step 6

Other elements such as the background are to be added, keeping the forms rough. We should ideally get in all the large and important forms to see what works on a general level, finer details can come after. By not disrupting the tall architecture on the left, we’ll utilize the height of the environment to give the structure a regal look. To accentuate the throne or chair on the isolated structure to the left, we’ll put in some circular architecture to make a statement with the shapes. This is a clever way to extract elements of the composition using simple design language. By repeating shapes such as the inlets and balconies on the right, we can help portray the scale of things when they repeat into the distance.

Step 7

If you’re happy with the line art, use the Image Size (Ctrl+Alt+I) window to bump up the pixels. I change mine with print in mind, so around 4000 width is ideal. Now we can start coloring within the lines. If the line art is on a separate layer, it makes coloring much easier since we can color under the line art layer neatly. A great way to color gradients behind elements as shown in the example below is to paint on a New Layer (Ctrl+Shift+N), then create another new layer above that and Alt-click in between them (shown below). This allows us to paint on the top layer while preserving the transparency of the layer underneath it. That was a bad explanation… which is even more reason to let loose and experiment yourself!

Step 8

The green area below shows part of the painting that we’ll make darker due to it catching less light. Notice that the closer the environment is, the darker and more saturated it appears; this is because of the atmospheric fog that builds up over greater distances – an incredibly useful technique to illustrate epic distances. Let’s not forget to flip the canvas horizontally now and again, even when roughing out our colors.

Step 9

Adding a red carpet or design on the path is another great way to show distance of elements. Here we can use the red carpet to bridge the side platform and main walkway structure. Now is the perfect time to lay down the main colors and light sources. Remember to work the entire painting and not get bogged down in detailing. Concentrating on one small area to perfection will disconnect us from the rest of the painting and rendering the entire painting to perfection will likely take far too much time for it to be worth it. We just need to establish the composition using color, lighting and space to a readable level and it should make for a successful piece. Working the entire painting will also keep the piece together and will be presentable to the client at earlier stages should they need it unexpectedly. As we did repetition in step 6, repeating the carpet in the distance helps sell the scale and suggest how far back it is.

Step 10

Now to define some of the elements a bit better – we can give the illusion of lights from a further space to achieve this. Harder brushes generally give more texture and life to a painting, but using a soft brush for volumetric lights such as the example below is very effective.

Step 11

A square brush will give us some much needed visual repetition for the stairs, so we’ll Right-click on the canvas to bring up the Brush palette, then Left-click the triangle on the right to bring up additional options and choose Square Brushes. These are default brushes that come bundled with the software package so it’s a much better idea to explore your own or look online for royalty-free, custom brushes. You can learn about creating custom brushes in great depth at Photoshop’s Brush Tool – Basic Guide by Alvaro Guzman.

Step 12

Play about with the spacing in the Brushes (F5) window until the thumbnail stroke below is what we’re looking for – something that is somewhat reminiscent of a staircase edge. In the example below, the square has been flattened slightly by the highlighted point and adjusted using Left-click. Experiment with the other parameters to see what suits you.

We can save the brush to use later by Right-clicking the canvas, Left-clicking the triangle and choosing New Brush Preset. Name the brush and it’ll be on the brush palette to use another time.

Step 13

Clean up anything standing out to keep the order of elements clear. We’ll highlight some edges too, just to bump up the definition to clearer values.

Step 14

Working around other areas of the painting – the green rim-light we did in Step 10 worked quite well, so let’s try that effect along the underside of the platform, too. We don’t need to make any lights too bright just yet – the extreme contrast values are very powerful, so let’s save them for later. By staying in the mid-range for a bit longer, we have more space to play around with the lighting of the composition without anything set heavily in stone. Notice the Navigator window is also up (Window > Navigator), this gives us the thumbnail view of the painting so we know what it looks like in the bigger picture while working zoomed in.

Step 15

If we paint a particular element on a new layer such as the green fog below, it gives us the flexibility to make changes to the layer using the Hue/Saturation (Ctrl+U) tool. Checking the Colorize option will allow us to give brighter grayscale values some color simply by lowering the Lightness parameter.

Step 16

Similarly to the treatment on Step 8, let’s darken the wall a bit to illustrate the absence of light. The green in the example is just to show where it is painted. Some gold has also been thrown in to compliment the red tones for a regal look to match the tall, elegant pillars. We could simply float anything we want to, but using pillars will ground the architecture in a believable way, giving the viewer something to acquaint themselves with if this were in the real world.

Step 17

The general composition uses a lot of cooler tones, so we can give the main walkway some warmth to stand out, suggesting to a natural light source. Test out some layer modes and colour combinations to see the effects and how they suit your own composition. In the example below the layer mode is changed to Overlay and the opacity is lowered so it isn’t too visible. If the effect isn’t strong enough, there’s always the option to brighten things up when polishing our piece up near the end.

Step 18

Let’s re-inforce the edges some more and put in some secondary light sources.

Step 19

To introduce some sci-fi elements, new lines drawn on a new layer can be controlled by choosing the Move Tool (V) and dragging individual corners of the Transform Box by Ctrl+Left-clicking. Alternatively, we can use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl+T). Having control of the corners allow us to apply the lines how we like into the perspective we want.

Step 20

Looks OK! Let’s try adding the same effect to the side platform, too.

Step 21

The platform looks quite bland and dim-lit. We could try lighting the place up with some civilian lights using the brush at a softer setting. Right-click on the canvas while using the Brush Tool (B) to adjust softness on the fly.

Step 22

At this point in the example, my computer blacked out from a power cut… But it doesn’t matter the work was saved! Remember to save with Ctrl+S or File > Save. This point was also when I noticed that the perspective was slightly off – it’s never too late to make changes! (Unless there’s no time left) Drawing new perspective lines on a separate layer makes it easier to remove when we’re done with them.

Step 23

Now we’ll paint in the floor correctly. By hand-painting and working on one layer as opposed to using a plate of tools will probably double your drawing practice at least, so it’s important not to get too caught up trying to use the latest features for these things – those tools will only barely nudge your foundational abilities so far when conceptualizing designs. That being said, you can use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to make straight-edged selections using Left-click

Step 24

As the eye is lead along the walkway, it needs some sort of visual reward as opposed to a plain floor and dead end. We’ll experiment a bit by throwing in some more levels of architecture – simple pedestals for now to test the creative waters.

Step 25

If we observe older open architecture that has had its fair share of rust, wind and debris, it’s usually not in spectacular shape. If we keep everything clean using selection tools and perfect fills the painting will look very digital, so roughing up edges or surfaces will give the painting some more authenticity and believability.

Step 26

Adding statues and setting their poses up for weapons could very much suggest some backstory. By drawing it on a pedestal, it’s almost part of a reward for guiding our viewers down what would otherwise be quite a boring floor (with a nice red carpet). We’re also setting the colors up to be in the gold or bronze ranges to match up with the banners around the set.

Step 27

To make the highlights on the statues ‘pop’, we can brush some lighter values on a separate layer set to Overlay. It’s very hard to predict what your layer will look like without changing it to Overlay first and experimenting with it. Don’t forget to zoom out/horizontally flip the canvas and check how it looks as a whole composition, not just as detailed sections.

Step 28

Now to add a weapon to suggest story elements, a tail to guide the viewer directionally and some arrows in it to make it look cuddly. Let your creativity loose! Let’s throw in some more red carpet just for good measure.

Step 29

We’ll draw the stairs back in using the brush we made in step 12. Suggesting the edge of the stairs is probably the fastest way to draw stairs without needing to be accurate. The measurement accuracy of the stairs isn’t important – only that we can sell the idea of stairs there and that their colour/lighting helps to achieve this.

Step 30

Let’s draw some lines where the viewer would see less light; this will reinforce the form of the stairs.

Step 31

This is a great chance to add some atmospheric fog over the further distances such as the circled areas in the example below. The walkway spotlight has also been emphasized more by painting darker values around it. Finally the figure to the left was almost black, washing out other dark values throughout the painting – simply knocking it back a little pulls the composition’s share of values together a bit more. We’ve also placed some human-sized figures around the set so the eye can relate to the scale of things.

Step 32

We can make a color adjustment now by changing the layer mode to Color and brushing any color over the layer underneath – in this case, blue. In doing so, all the values underneath that will be influenced towards the blue range, where 100% blue values will change all the values beneath it to the blue range.

Step 33

Finally let’s give the image a border to frame it presentably. First make sure our background color is what we want our border to be, then open up the Canvas Size (Ctrl+Alt+C) window. Use a value of 50px for both the Width and Height parameters (choose Pixels on the drop-down menu) and make sure the Relative option is checked. If left unchecked, it will actually change the canvas to 50px by 50px as opposed to add an additional 50px around the existing canvas size. If the Canvas extension color is set to Background (default) then choosing OK will give our image a 50px by 50px border.

Step 34

… Time is up, sign your piece!

Conclusion

In the case of more time, you can keep on adding gritty details and story elements to the composition to give the piece more realism and believability that it would be a viable set in real life. However, to reflect the amount of time spent on this, the concept should suffice for a presentable ground to work from in a fast production environment. If you’ve captured the concept of the interior space you’re trying to convey, the client can take the piece off of your hands at any time. Working over the whole painting simply gives you the ability to add details once the concept is “captured”. There’s no special tools in the latest software trends to draw a presentable piece – all you need is time. Experiment and practice your fundamental knowledge of composition, lighting and color with every piece, I hope you learned something useful from reading this wall of text!

Create Character Driven Book Cover Art Using Illustrator and Photoshop – Part 2

Andrea Austoni — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:35:58 +0000

In this two part tutorial on creating the “Let’s Go To Monster School!” book cover, I’ll show you a complete process from initial sketch to the final artwork, using an Illustrator to Photoshop integrated workflow. We employed Illustrator in Part 1 to trace our hand drawn sketch, lay down the shapes and define the basic colors.

Now we’ll take the vector drawing into Photoshop where we will refine the shading, add some textures, and complete the book cover with the appropriate typography. Let’s continue on with Part 2 of this series.

Take a look at the image we’ll be creating. Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. You can view the final image preview below.

This illustration is a cover art for a fictitious novel called “Let’s Go To Monster School!”. It depicts a fun monster professor teaching insane science in a dingy classroom. We already created the basic image in Part 1. Now we’ll finish the artwork with textures and lots of brushwork using a pen tablet in this Part 2 of this series.

Step 1

Open the PSD drawing we exported in Part 1 (1a) and check that each element sits on its own layer (1b).

Let’s start with the blackboard. The first thing to do is to lock its transparent pixels (1c). This is crucial, as it allows us to paint on the layer without affecting its edges or painting outside of them. The lines we carefully crafted in Illustrator are therefore safe. Lock the transparency of all layers unless specified later on.

Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and use a low value (1d). Then go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur (1e) to turn the sharp noise into a hazy texture. The blackboard is now a bit more rugged (1f).

Step 2

Add a subtle Gradient Overlay to the layer (2a) to enhance the feeling of depth. The blackboard gets darker as it recedes towards the corner of the room (2b). We are satisfied with the result therefore there’s no need to keep the layer style active. Right-click on the layer and choose Create Layer. The Gradient Overlay will be turned into a normal layer above the blackboard, masked to it (2c). Select it and hit Command + E to merge it down. We have one layer now (2d).

Step 3

We are going to add several layers of erased chalk marks on the blackboard. To accomplish that we have to select white as the foreground color (try hitting D then X).

Hit B to select the Brush Tool and F5 to open the Brushes palette. Photoshop already has a few chalky brushes so pick one, I like number 36 (3a). Next activate Opacity Jitter under Other Dynamics and set the Control to Pen Pressure (3b).

If you don’t have a tablet leave the Control off. Under Brush Tip Shape increase the Diameter to an appropriate value (test the brush on the blackboard) and change the rotation Angle if the default one is not to your liking (3c). I find it hard to paint very lightly with a tablet so in the option bar at the top of the screen I set the brush’s Opacity to 50% (3d).

Step 4

Paint several passes of random chalk marks on a separate layer, making sure they overlap (4a). Apply a good dose of Gaussian Blur to smooth them (4b), then set the layer to Soft Light with 50% Opacity (4c). The blackboard looks used now, just what we need (4d). Of course feel free to repeat this step until you’re satisfied with the result.

Step 5

Now the real fun starts! Select another, more textured chalky brush (5a) and fill the blackboard with pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Go crazy here, this is Monster School! (5b)

Step 6

The blackboard is done. Let’s take care of the classroom now. You need some dingy textures for the floor and the walls, plus a wood texture for the baseboard. The ones I’m using can be downloaded for free from the website CGTextures. Once you create an account you can download the textures for free, with a daily limit of 15 MB. Here are the direct links to the textures I used:

Place the floor texture in your document (6a), hit Command + T to select Free Transform, then using Distort and Skew (from the right-click menu) adapt it to the floor (6b). Set its blending mode to Multiply so the gradient we applied to the floor shows through (6c).

Step 7

To create color variation on the tiles we use the Dodge and Burn Tools. Accessible from the Toolbar (Shift + O to cycle through), these two tools allow us to respectively lighten and darken objects using brush tips.

Using the default settings and a big, soft brush set to low opacity, darken the tiles under the monster and closer to the baseboards (using Burn). Lighten some areas irregularly (using Dodge) to add the impression of an old, stained floor (7a, 7b).

Step 8

Map both walls with the plaster textures downloaded before. Place the first texture in the document (8a) and distort it to match the wall’s perspective, using Perspective and Distort while in Free Transform mode (8b). Do the same for the second wall. Set both textures to Multiply, 70% Opacity (8c).

Step 9

Go back to the first chalky brush, the one we used on the blackboard. Add a blank mask to each plaster texture (9a) and paint discoloration strokes into it (9b). Using the Burn Tool set to Midtones, darken the textures at the bottom where they meet the baseboard and in the corner where they meet each other. That’s where the shadows are (9c).

Step 10

Place the wood texture in the document (10a) and adapt it to the left half of the baseboard (10b). Hit W to select the Magic Wand Tool and click on the yellow baseboard (10c). Use this selection to create a mask on a layer group in which you’ll place the wood texture (10d). This way you don’t need to be super precise when placing the texture. Mirror the right half (10e).

Step 11

Create dark stains and discoloration spots on the baseboard using the Burn Tool set to a small diameter (11a, 11b). Hide every layer except the ones that make up the walls, the baseboard and the floor. Hit Command + A to select everything and Shift + Command + C to copy all layers merged together. A simple Command + V will paste the entire classroom on a new layer.

One last touch. Pick the Dodge Tool with a small diameter and brighten up the corner where the walls meet. Paint a faintly irregular vertical stroke down the entire length of the corner, where it catches the highlights (11c, 11d).

Step 12

To complete the classroom, add a Drop Shadow to the blackboard (12a). Use the settings that give a result similar to images 12b and 12c. And since we’re sticklers for perspective, let’s create a layer from the drop shadow and distort it to match the perspective (12d). It’s one of those subtle details that count in giving an overall convincing result.

Step 13

The classroom is finished so you can lock its layer. We can finally work on the monster now. The character we exported from Illustrator has flat, uninteresting shading. We need to add depth to it by painting lit areas, shadows and highlights, considering an ideal light source from the top. We will use the Dodge and Burn Tools to brighten and darken the character and the Brush Tool to create the necessary color variations. The Blur Tool will come in handy to smooth the light/shadow and color transitions and to remove unsightly brush strokes.

Activate the Burn Tool and set it up for overall use (13a). Selecting Midtones makes the tool affect the base color, therefore allowing us to start defining the shadows. Shade the horn all around its edges, especially the bottom edge and the base where it attaches to the body (13b). Enhance the roundness by darkening more towards the edges.

Step 14

Using the same technique shade the bottom eyelid (14a). Using a medium green, soft brush with low opacity, go ahead and smooth the color transition by painting where the dark green meets the yellow shade (14b). Now highlight the top edge with a single, smooth yellow stroke (14c). All the upward edges catch highlights and must therefore be brighter than the base color. Anytime you do this you can try the Dodge Tool, set to Midtones. Sometimes the result is too washed out so it’s easier to just paint in the color you want. Darken the bottom edge again (14d) and lightly brighten the center pixels to smooth the contrast (14e). Use the Blur Tool to smooth the colors as necessary. Shade the top eyelid in a similar way (14f). As you can see painting is done by first laying down color roughs and then refining.

Step 15

Make the eyeball round by painting the shadows cast by the eyelids (15a). On a separate layer paint some light red veins for a good bloodshot eye effect. Of course use a brush with a small diameter (15b).

Step 16

Burn the eyelid shadow on the iris and enhance the highlight with the Dodge Tool. The secret is to layer soft, transparent, sweeping strokes on top of each other.

Step 17

Merge the warts into a single layer and set it to Overlay mode (17a). Set up Burn for Highlights to affect brightly lit pixels (17b) and darken the bottom edges of each wart to make them pop out (17c). Set up Dodge (17d) and paint highlights on the top edges to complete the shading (17e). Finally add a Drop Shadow style (17f). Now these are good looking warts (17g)!

Step 18

Darken the outer rim of the head (18a) and paint a shadow below the mouth (18b). Paint a highlight on the lower lip (18c). Repeat the process to create the upper lip (18d).

Step 19

Add another shadow on the neck and at the sides of the mouth (19a). Darken the head underneath the eye. Merge down the bottom eyelid and use the Blur Tool to get rid of the hard seam (19b).

Step 20

As you recall from the sketch, there is grass growing on the professor’s head. Let’s paint it! Choose a small brush (20a), set up Fade (20b) and Opacity (20c). Paint curved grass stalks growing out of the head on a separate layer (20d). The number next to fade sets the length of the stalks. Using different diameters, colors and fade values, create two varied wisps of grass on the head (20e).

Step 21

Shade the teeth much like we did the horn (21a). Remember to paint the shadows cast by the lips. Darken the fins where they meet the head (21b).

Step 22

Paint shadows on the left hand. Darken the bottom edge and the area that enters the sleeve (22a). Paint shadows on the fingers too, and add highlights along the top edges of the whole hand (22b). Unlock the transparency of the fingers and blur them where they meet the hand. Also paint shadows on the stick (22c).

Step 23

The tail has a strong shadow cast by the lab coat and secondary shadows along the top and bottom edges. The shadows must be tapered towards the tip (23a). By now you should have gotten the drift so shade both feet (23b, 23c).

Step 24

The lab coat is white but there are a lot of shadows cast onto it by the monster and by itself. Start off with the lapels, darkening them where they meet the monster’s head and along the outer edges (24a). To shade the coat darken the outer edges, paint shadows underneath the lapels and hint at folds by darkening areas along the length. The right side also casts a shadow onto the left side (24b, 24c).

Step 25

Add a small Drop Shadow to the buttons (25a, 25b). No need to shade them, as they are rather small.

Step 26

Darken the right sleeve along its longitudinal edges (26a) then merge it down on the coat and blend the seam with the Blur Tool. Paint some tighter folds at the armpit (26b). Paint a shadow on the inside of the sleeve (26c).

Step 27

Using the same logic shade the left sleeve and the pocket. Paint shadows onto the coat and the left hand. The coat is finished (27a).

The light comes from the ceiling so the professor casts a rather sharp shadow onto the floor. There are no layer styles that can help us here, we have to paint it (in black). Set the layer to Multiply mode and regulate the Opacity to about 60%. Using the Blur Tool to soften the shadow as it recedes from the monster, another nice little touch (27b).

Step 28

The painting is complete. All we need to do now is add the appropriate typography to finish the book cover. I used the beautiful Egyptienne typeface Farao by the Storm Foundry, check it out.

Conclusion

The aim of this two-part tutorial is to show a typical illustration workflow from the conceptual sketch, through the basic drawing, and into the final painting. The task was to lay down a clean vector drawing in Illustrator and subsequently add life to it in Photoshop using textures and traditional painting techniques adapted to the digital format.

I hope you had fun and learned a few useful workflow tips. You should now be ready to create your own weird characters to try your hand at digital painting. Have fun and never stop learning!

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Create a Vivid Themed Illustration Using Simple Hand-Drawn Elements – Part II

Wojciech Pijecki — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:29:04 +0000

Drawn elements are certainly something that can enhance an illustration. Even if you’re not very good at drawing, you can still create a quality piece. All you need is a good idea and some Photoshop skills. And if you don’t believe me, you will definitely change your mind after reading this Part II of his two part tutorial series. So let’s take a look inside!

Final Image Preview

Part II Tutorial Details

Program: Photoshop CS3
Difficulty: Advanced
Estimated Completion Time: 4-5 hours

Introduction and Preparation

It’s a themed illustration about "No Beauty," this hides an idea that no beauty lasts forever. Suddenly all that’s great and beautiful falls apart. All the happiness is gone with the colorful pieces. The final outcome has its own mood, even thou it’s colorful, it’s still kinda frightening.

And as I said this is kinda simple but you may be wondering why this tutorial is labeled as advanced level. Well everything is fine as long as you have some base to work on. Here we have absolutely nothing, we will create this piece from scratch. So what’s hard, is all the illustration depth, shading and colorization. Beside that, there are some things you just need to feel.

Ok, now let’s take a look what we’re going to use here:

Splatter, from 123rf.com
Broken Blush, from sxc.hu
Scratchy texture, from sxc.hu
Splashes 1,2,3, from istockphoto.com
Handmade Brushes 1,2, from brushesdownload.com
Ink Brushes (optionaly), brushesdownload.com
Paint Strokes 1,2, brushesdownload.com
Self-Drawn Elements on Paper

Step 1

Just to remind you of what we created in the Tutorial Part I, the first image below shows our final outcome. Remember that you need to work now below all adjustment layers (which affect the whole illustration) and also below the overall room shading that we added.

OK, so pay attention to the second image below. I drew something like that in the first tutorial part, this is the sketch of how I pictured the splashes. And I decided not to cover the whole face with splashes.

Step 2

I found three nice splashes (1,2,3) from istockphoto, which you can view in the first image below.

There are few ways to do the extraction, and because the background is white it’s quite an easy task. You can do this using Color Range, however we don’t need the full splashes here, and a more accurate job need the Pen Tool. Look at the third splash below and the green rectangle. It’s a good part to fit our face.

Let’s zoom into this part and use the Pen Tool to cut it out. Using this technique is reasonably fast (and the color range technique sometimes leaves a little bit of the background color, which we don’t want). So check the last image below (the black one) and you can see it’s very precise. I compared the background with a black color and yes, it’s full red, no white edges.

Step 3

Now as I said we just need a little bit of this splash, so make it fit into the face and use a soft eraser or a layer mask to get rid of the square edge of the splash (first image below). Then apply Image > Adjustments > Selective Color and brighten all the tones in this dark red splash. To do this we need to use Reds, Yellows, Neutrals, and Blacks (second image below). Now this looks over saturated, so let’s take the saturation down (third image below). Then it’s good to give a little more brightness (forth image).

Step 4

I’ll show you now what to do in points:

This is the result we reached so far.
Create a new layer above the splash, with Blending Mode set to Color. Grab a soft brush and paint with a brownish color to make the shade more suitable to skin shadows.
Compare image 1 to 3, and see how the shade changed its color. It’s starting to look like it’s really a skin splash!
Merge all the layers connected with the splash into one. And use the Burn Tool (range: Midtones) to make the splash darker, like the bottom face color.

Step 5

Now duplicate the face layer and place it above the splash. Flip it horizontally to make the dark skin cover our splash (first image below). Go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All (second image below). Then use a soft, white brush and paint on the layer mask while having the “splash” selection activated (third image below).

This may look a little confusing. Let’s review what this does? Well, basically we’re revealing the skin from the copied face. And we’re doing this on the splash to make it look more skin textured. It’s a tiny difference, but believe me, if you zoom in, you will see the difference. The splash will look like real skin.

Step 6

OK, let’s bring up another splash. Again use the Pen Tool to make a precise cut out. Now turn it in the right direction (first image below). Then use a hard eraser (or layer mask with a hard, black brush) to make a perfect match to the skin (second image below). Then soft-erase the squared top part of the splash.

Step 7

As when we were applying the previous splash, use Image > Adjustments > Selective Color and adjust the same colors. Play around with the values starting from Reds, Yellow, Neutrals, and Blacks. Try to make the splash color brighter (first image below). Then turn down the saturation (third image below) and finally give a touch of brightness (forth image below).

Step 8

Use the Burn Tool to match the colors of the bottom face skin and our splash.
As previously, duplicate the “face” layer and place it to cover the splash with skin.
Go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All (this fully masks the duplicated “face” layer).
Add the skinny touch painting on the layer mask with a soft, white brush.
Make some final touch-ups. I used the Patch Tool to get rid of unwanted light and burned some parts more with the Burn Tool.

Step 9

OK, when it comes to adding lighter splashes, the job is much easier.

Make a good match with the skin shape.
Use Selective Color the same way as previously to get the over saturated look (and it’s great with selective color, as it also makes the shade softer).
Next use Hue/Saturation and turn the Saturation halfway down (don’t overdo) to match the splash color with skin color.
If it still isn’t enough, go (as previously) to Brightness/Contrast and enhance the Brightness, while lowering the Contrast just a touch, and we should be fine.

Note: The lights may sometimes come a bit sharp and bright, so you can always get rid of them using the Patch Tool or just by erasing some parts of the splash.

Step 10

As you see now, the shadow below the face will be a little bit different because we changed the shape. Find the same color as you used previously, while painting the shadow. Grab a very soft brush and add more shadow where objects are getting closer to the ground (as you see in the fist and second images below).

Step 11

Now to add more skin-splash touches, we need to use another image of paint. It’s a good to have it in the same color, then the adjustment values will not change much. So bring up this Splatter image to Photoshop and start extracting using the Pen Tool.

As you see in the first image below, you do not have to cut out the whole piece, just the bottom part. And also the extraction needs to give you a nice rounded stain without dark shadows.

Everything is shown in the images below. You just need to repeat what you did previously with the splashes, but yeh, with each new splash you must search new adjustment values (as they are not the same). So the values will be quite similar, but not exactly the same.

Step 12

Grab the Brush Tool with soft settings (Flow at 2% and Hardness set to 0%). Create a new layer below these skin parts, and use a dark color (that fits to the surface) to add a tiny shadow. I used the color: #2f1d0e.

Then look at second image below and create two new layers above the skin parts. We will make a small touch up to one of them. As shown in the image – change these layer Blending Options: one to Overlay and the second to Multiply. Then using the same soft brush, change your color as shown in the second image below and paint in the indicated spots to make this skin look more realistic.

Step 13

It’s the right time to add some hand-drawn pieces. My drawing skills are pretty lame and I’m aware of that, but since I have some basics I was able to create several very simple elements that look good enough for this purpose. And with good Photoshop skills you can turn your simple drawings into something really cool.

So take a piece of paper, a pencil and use your imagination to create some nice shapes (or you can use mine as well). Now shoot a photo of each one (it’s good to have natural daylight while taking a picture). Then open each one and if they are too dark, use Layer > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and then Layer > Adjustments > Levels to get a nice contrast between the edges and the background. Next use the Pen Tool to extract. While extracting, work on a big canvas (don’t resize the photos).

Step 14

As you see my drawn element is quite big and that’s a good thing. Now you can use Command + T and click Warp in the top menu bar. Work on bending this shape to get various results. Obviously the warping will get our element a little blurry, but after we resize it down it will not be noticeable (second image below).

Next I wanted to add some depth to this piece by making it less plane. To do this you need the Burn Tool and Dodge Tool. In the third image below, the green arrows indicate the lower spots (that need to get painted using the Burn Tool set to Midtones) and the red arrows indicate the upper spots (that need to get painted with the Dodge Tool set to Highlights).

And after adding depth, you may color this element using Hue/Saturation.

Step 15

In the first image below I used the same element as previously and I bent it using the Warp Tool to get many different shapes. I also made them in different colors and turned each shape to different sizes (for depth). They were placed before and after the face.

Now comes the time to add some shading to make these elements fit. You need to remember a few things:

When you’re manually adding shadows, use the softest brush (set to 0% Hardness with even 1-2% Flow! Only Opacity stays always at 100%).
Shadows in reality always look a little bit different than in an illustration, but we should simulate the shadow to make it unnoticeable.
When I add shadows I always sample colors from the surface (and turn them a bit darker than the sampled color, and that makes the shadow fit nicely even if it isn’t quite real). The reason to do this is because every object’s shadow has a touch of color from the ground that it occupies (for some good pointers on making shadows you can read the Super Malleable Lines tutorial, see step 5).

Step 16

OK, we can start adding some more drawn elements. So in the first image below, the orange arrows indicate spots that I actually wanted to burn with the Burn Tool (set to Midtones), and the green ones indicate spots that needed some more light (use the Dodge Tool set to Highlights). As you can see, the proper use of simple tools can make your elements really shape up.

So in the images below you basically need to cut out the top part of this element and replace it with the same copied one (but with a different angle). Meanwhile add a Hue/Saturation adjustment to this element and colorize it to taste. If you just slowly study the images below you’ll notice that I made several rotations with the same elements, I duplicated them and did some cutouts (to make them fit better).

Step 17

OK, now again repeat the previous step by adding another element. Then using the same tools (Burn/Dodge) make the element shape up (second image below). Next in the third image below (when colorizing) you can use a few layer adjustments to make it look better. In this case I went for Hue/Saturation and Curves to give a nice yellowish green tone.

Step 18

Continue adding various shaped elements. Treat them the same way as previously. Add various tones, rotate them and place them in different spots. Don’t forget to use Command + T then check the Warp Tool in the top menu bar, this really helps make the same shapes look way different.

Note: Remember, when you Warp a raster element, like our hand-drawn shapes you need to do it on a big size piece and then resize the element down. It will help you achieve the high quality all the way to the end. Otherwise it will just get blurry and not quite suitable.

Step 19

Now to make sure everything has its own place in this illustration you need to take care for shadows. Each element placed in this room space needs some shading attention (unless it’s very tiny or too small). So if you have no light specified light source, add shadows somewhere below the object.

To do the shading part you need a very soft brush with a dark color, as mentioned before. The best way is to sample the color from the floor and make it way darker. Then start adding soft shadows under the elements. Remember if objects are closer to the ground – the shadows begins to get harder and more visible. Also don’t paint with the brush (holding left-click), make just single separated clicks. This will help you get a soft and barely visible shadow.

Step 20

I believe here is a nice relaxing moment of the tutorial. Now using the paint strokes brushes (1 and 2) create some cool shaped pieces. Do this with colors sampled from the illustration. It’s always a good way to help yourself with an Eyedropper, this helps you fluently move in the right color tones. And yeh, if you have a good eye – you can pick some colors by your own taste, it’s good to experiment!

Note: Remember that not every paint stroke needs to look the same when it was saved as a brush. You can help yourself with a soft eraser to make the shape look good to you.

Step 21

You should find a window shape in the stroke brushes. Use a dark brown color and place the brush. If you want to place it on the wall, then you’ll need to contort it into perspective using Command + T > Distort (first image below). Then, with Pen Tool, create a Shape Layer below this brush and fill it with white (the reason why it’s not fully white is because in Tutorial Part I we added some overall shading to the whole illustration, and it seems like the brushing is covering some part of the window) – second image below.

Now look at the third image below, turn the “shape” layer into a selection and paint on a new layer using a dull blue color (#689aac). Then, using the Pen Tool, create two parallel lines. Stroke both paths with simulate pressure, and give them blue and white colors (forth image below). Merge them and make around 20 duplicates, then spread them inside the window to give it a nice texture.

And finally you can cover the window with some more brushes as previously (fifth image below).

Step 22

Again using paint stroke brushes, paint the ceiling to fill the illustration even more. I need to use these brushes with barely visible gray/white tones to fit the surface. OK, so grab the Brush Tool, choose the desired paint stroke brush shape, set your flow to around 10%, and add some various brushes on anew layer.

Step 23

When I was creating this piece I found nice handmade brushes that will be really useful here (1 and 2). Append them to Photoshop brushes and using different colors and sizes, spread them all over the illustration. This should look like a chaotic throw.

Step 24

When you’re done with the handmade brushes go back again to our paint stroke brushes, use white for the color and apply one big brush on a new layer (first image below). Then call the selection of this brush by Command-clicking on the layer thumbnail, and go to Select > Modify > Contract, use the value of 2 (second image below). Next, bend it with Command + T and select Warp in the top menu (third image below). Now resize it down (use Command + T) and place it in the space.

You can repeat this step many times with different colors. It’s good to add these effects as they give an impression of drawn elements.

Step 25

As this illustration is named "No Beauty" you can think of some elements connected with the beauty. I found two free pictures of blush, that are a little bit out of focus. But anyway, we will resize this blush down, so the blur won’t be seen.

OK, grab the Pen Tool and cut out several crushed parts of this blush, paste it on some white documents and touch them up a little. Use the Burn Tool (Midtones) and burn them as show in the second image below. Then simply make them fit our illustration.

Note: if you decided to put some parts of the blush near the ground, then you need to treat the floor with some shadow!

Step 26

To make this illustration even more wrecked, I’ll show you how to create a leaking hole in the wall. There are six screenshots below, so I will describe them in order:

Grab the Pen Tool (set it in the options to Shape Layer) and draw a nice curvy hole shape on the wall, and make it black. Name this layer "Hole."
Turn off the "Hole" layer, go to the Layers Palette, Command-click on this layer’s thumbnail (the selection should appear). Now hit Command + Shift + C (Copy Merged) and then Command + V (Paste). Now name this layer "Wall Part." Move the copied "Wall Part" in front of the hole (you can also bend it using the Warp Tool). And make the "Hole" layer visible.
Duplicate the "Wall Part" layer three to four times, move those duplicates below the original layer and use the keyboard arrows to change their spots to top left (one after another) to create a fake 3d effect. Merge these duplicates and use the Burn Tool (set to Midtones) to give it more depth.
Now do same thing to the "Hole" layer. But this time make only one duplicate (colorize it to brown for example to see the difference) and move this copy to top left using the keyboard arrows. This should look now exactly like the forth image below.
Then bring up the selection of the "Hole" layer (Command-click on the layer’s thumbnail), next hold Command + Alt and click on the "Hole copy" layer (to remove the selection of this copied layer). You should get a tiny selection in the bottom edge. Create a new layer above the "Hole" layer and fill it with a dark brown color. Use the Burn Tool (set to Midtones) and Dodge Tool (set to Midtones) to make this edge stand out more.
Copy the skin splashes that we made in the beginning (you can also resize down after copying) and place them dripping from our hole. Use the Burn Tool (set to Midtones) to make it fit the splash top parts to the black hole’s background. Then add some shadow under these drips (same way as you’ve created shadow in the previous steps).

Step 27

Take a look at:

First Image Below: As a final touch-up, add a Layer Adjustment of Black and White in the Layers Palette (on the top of all layers), change it’s Opacity the way you like (around 30-50%) and set the Blending Mode to Soft Light.
Second Image Below: Hit Command + Shift + A (to select the whole canvas), Command + Shift + C (to Copy the whole canvas), Command + V (Paste on the top of all layers), and then apply Command + Shift + U (to Desaturate).
Third Image Below: Change the Opacity of this layer to 40%, set the Blending Mode to Soft Light, then go to Layer > Adjustment > Shadows/Highlights and enhance the Amount of Highlights. This brings an HDR touch.
Forth Image Below: Finally again hit Command + Shift + A (to Select the whole canvas), Command + Shift + C (to Copy the whole canvas), Command + V (Paste on the top of all layers), change the Blending Mode to Overlay and go to Filter > Other > Highpass, and set the value to 1.

Conclusion

So here we are folks. I hope you can successfully apply these effects to your own pieces now. May the detail be with you!

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Create a Vivid Themed Illustration Using Simple Hand-Drawn Elements – Part I

Wojciech Pijecki — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:39:48 +0000

Final Image Preview

Part I – Tutorial Details

Program: Photoshop CS3
Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced
Estimated Completion Time: 2 hours

Introduction and Preparation

Ok, now let’s take a look what we’re going to use:

Step 1

I always try to work on a big canvas, but for the tutorial purposes I will go use a document that is 815 px by 1050 px. Just to save you some money from buying large pictures. Anyway, drag the paper texture to our document, duplicate it twice and to each copy hit Command + T (Free Transform) and then select Distort. Refer to the second image below and look how to transform these two paper copies, they need to create a perspective as shown.

Now in the same image – two green frames show you where to cut the main paper to get a good connection. Finally, grab the Patch Tool and get rid of the bad looking textures (third image below).

Step 2

Next use Command + U and lower the Saturation of this background paper texture a bit. If the texture still needs some work (first image below), then use the Patch Tool or Clone Stamp Tool to cover some imperfections.

Then, let’s say that the paper background is some kind of a room, so I thought these walls need some more contrast. To make the texture look better, use the Burn Tool (Range – Midtones), and burn in the connection lines to make it look more like a room.

Step 3

Now, while you still have the Burn Tool selected, make the diameter very small and paint in the top and bottom edges (first image below – where the arrows indicate). This should help to keep the walls, floor and ceiling separated.

OK, look at the second image below. From my experience I knew I’d give this image more contrast in the final product so for now I kinda lowered the overall contrast giving the feeling that all these walls are very light. To do this use levels as shown in the second image below.

Step 4

I assume you have merged all your wall layers together for easier work. If you didn’t, let’s do it now. Then duplicate (Command + J) the “walls” layer and change its Opacity to Overlay. Now go to Filter > Other > High Pass and add the value of 1 or 2. You should immediately get the result shown in the first picture below.

Now hit Command + Shift + A to select the whole canvas, then Command + Shift + C (Copy merged), and Command + V (Paste). Turn the previous “walls” layer off. Leave only the white background layer visible and the new merged layer.

Create a new layer above all, change its Opacity to Multiply, grab the Eyedropper Tool and sample some dark brown color. Then use the Brush Tool with 0% Hardness and around 3% Flow, and then paint as shown in the second picture below to create some irregular shading. Notice how the floor and ceiling is being created by doing this.

Step 5

Select the merged layer (the one with the whole canvas) and use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select the top part of the image, then hold Command and drag this part down. This will help us repair the perspective, because in the beginning we made it pretty much random (if you can imagine this, the diagonal wall lines should cross in the center of the image). Next, look at the second image below and use the Patch Tool to get rid of the straight line indicated by the arrows (which is a result of repairing perspective).

Step 6

Let’s open the scratchy texture (link in introduction) and hit Command + Shift + U to Desaturate it. Then you can add Levels (Command + L) and enhance the whites, just to make these tiny scratch lines more visible. Take a look at the second image below, what we need to do is place this texture in the floor spot.

There is also alternative way to do this step by stretching the texture (as you see in the third image below) to get the right perspective (using Command + T > Distort), but well, as not everyone has the correct eye to make this right, we can stick to the position in the second image below.

Step 7

As you have positioned this texture, go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All. This will make the texture totally invisible. So then grab the Brush Tool, make your brush setting very soft (Flow at around 4% and Hardness at 0%). Then use white for the color and paint on the layer mask of the texture.

The first image below shows the full mask view, and it’s shown where I painted to reveal the texture. Now look at the second image below, and notice how nicely this texture blends with the white background.

Step 8

Use the same technique from the previous step to create the ceiling surface. Now open the face picture. Now grab the Eraser Tool set to 100% Hardness and 100% Flow, and get rid of the surrounding skin flowers. An accurate cut out is not necessary, as we will work the face shape in the following steps. For now we also need to resize down this face to make it more suitable to the illustration (third image below). Everything needs its own place in a quality piece, let your own eye be the judge of proportions.

Step 9

Now let’s shape up this face. Grab the Pen Tool and draw a curvy path around the whole face. Pay attention to make lots of cavity shapes (absolutely no squares). After you’re done, turn the path into a selection and hit Command + Shift + I to inverse the selection (first image below), then hit Delete. Now you should get something similar to the second image below.

When you work on an illustration like this you need to do a lot of work and planning. In the third image below I wanted to show you how I pictured in my head – what the next steps might look like. I sketched the face falling apart, and basically I wanted to do this by smudging the skin, but ultimately this turned out as splashes.

Step 10

I made some further corrections to the face, as I didn’t like the face center (first image below). So if you want you can use the Pen Tool to cut more of the face. Pay attention to her nose, the holes are looking kinda weird (like the right one is barely noticeable). To correct this use the Burn Tool (with Range set to Midtones) and a small diameter. Burn the right nose hole (second image below). Be careful, the Burn Tool can affect the nose skin also, so that’s why we need a small diameter to make it with precision.

If you still have the Burn Tool selected, make your diameter bigger and paint where the green arrows indicate (third image below). I wanted to enhance some shadows and also the bottom of the face. Soon we will drop some shadow below this face, and to make everything work properly it’s good to add shade to the bottom part of this skin.

Step 11

The face seems kinda pale so let’s warm it up a little. Select the “face” layer, hold Alt and go to the Layers Palette, and pick Gradient Map (check option Use Previous Layer To Create Clipping Mask). Look at the first image below and use similar colors as mine. Select the Gradient Map layer, change its Blending Mode to Soft Light and lower its Opacity to around 20-30% (not to overload the face with color). Then using Alt again, add another Adjustment Layer, which is Curves and adjust it just a little bit to get the similar look as in the third image below.

Step 12

OK, now make sure you no longer need to change anything in the color of the face and then select these two adjustment layers (Curves and Gradient Map) and also our “face” layer. Then hit Command + E to merge them. Next use Command + J to duplicate the “face” layer, drag the copy below original one and move it a little to the top left (first image below).

You can achieve even more variety and less plane results if you rotate this face (second image below). Then grab the Lasso Tool and make a selection around the indicated part above the nose, hit Command + Shift + I to inverse the selection (third image below) and use delete to get rid of all the unwanted parts.

Step 13

And what is this all about? This face looked very flat to me. To avoid that look it’s good to add some depth. As you can see, the first image below is the view that we get after deleting all the unwanted parts from the previous step, and the face cut is barely visible.

We’re going to use the Burn Tool (with Range set to Midtones) to add the skin depth by giving some shade to the duplicated “face” layer lying below the original one (second image below).

Step 14

I hope I clear up to this step, because if you didn’t understand the previous one, this will be kinda confusing. You may want to review if needed. Now we need to repeat Step 13 to personally chosen parts of the skin. So use the Burn Tool (Midtones) to paint in cavity spots as in the previous step. Then use the Dodge Tool (Midtones) in convex spots (first image below, spots indicated by green arrows).

You can do this to each skin edge, but remember, this may not look good applied everywhere. Also notice that I did those cuts with different angles (on purpose) to get some irregular depth.

Step 15

This may be difficult to understand as well, but don’t get terrified, the explanation is straight-forward. Look at the first image below. The selection that you see is nothing else than all these cuts merged together in one layer (the ones we did in previous step). And it looks so weird because there are some skin remains under our original face.

So I hold down Command and left-clicked on the merged “skin” layer’s thumbnail to get this selection. So now that you have this selection, create a new layer just below the “face” layer, but above the merged “skin” layer. Now change its Blending Mode to Multiply and pick a dark pink or dark brown color color (like #653737). Grab the Brush Tool, with the settings as usual (Flow at 3% and Hardness at 0%). Then do the same thing as previously, darken the cavity spots again.

Use the same process for convex spots, create a new layer above the previous one, change its Blending Mode to Overlay. Now use the same brush settings (but with a very light, brownish color, almost white) to paint in the convex spots.

This step may not be necessary for you, but I always pay extra attention to details and well, it’s important to make this look quality. And I did this because the burn tool and dodge tool don’t always do the best job and sometimes you just need to correct it manually.

Step 16

OK, if you’re done with the face cuts, I believe you can merge all the “face” layers including: “skin,” “shading,” “lights,” and “face.” Then make a new layer below the “face” layer.

Go to the Layers Palette, recall the selection of face (Command-click on the layer’s thumbnail). Grab the Paint Bucket Tool, pick a dark color with a little red or brown tone (something like #5b5555). Fill this selection with it (on the new layer) – see the first image below.

Then deselect, and use Command + T to make face shadow (second image below). Lower the Opacity of the “shadow” layer to around 20-40%.

Next you can use the same color and a very soft brush to paint on a new layer in the shadow spot. Do this to correct shadow imperfections (third image below).

Step 17

Now, I took a fresh look at the image and decided to remove a small part of the face because it bothered me. So you can do the same using the Pen Tool (first image below). And you see, it’s good to have the “face” layer merged, now you can work easily. It’s even better when you have a backup of each part.

In the second image below I used the Dodge Tool on her eyes and eye shadows (first with Midtones, then a little bit of Highlights). When you take a fresh look, many new things can be noticed. Remember to work dynamically!

Step 18

In these final steps we will do some overall adjustments. Go to the top of the Layers Palette and create a new Adjustment Layer there of Black and White. Change its Blending Mode to Soft Light and adjust the Opacity to make it work for you fine.

The adjustment layer should automatically have its own layer mask. So now click on the layer mask and use a soft black brush to paint on the parts that you don’t want to get affected the Black and White adjustment layer (I picked mostly the darkest illustration spots).

Step 19

Now, add some more adjustment layers in the top of the Layers Palette. First go for Curves and make the tones of the whole illustration look similar (like everything came from one picture). Then make some more adjustments using Color Balance, and basically it’s the same idea. Fill it with your personal settings.

Step 20

Next we’re going to add some room shading (first image below), create a new layer above all to do this, and use the Brush Tool with very soft settings (as usual). Pick a dark purple color (like #1a0a18) depending on how your illustration is colored – mine looks kinda cold purple to me.

Now create another new layer above all, hit D on the keyboard to set the colors to default. Grab the Gradient Tool, set it to Radial (from white to black) and fill the whole canvas (second image below).

Finally set this layer’s Blending Mode to Overlay and turn the Opacity down to 15%. You can look at the third image below, the spot indicated with green circles shows where we added a little bit of focus by doing this.

Step 21

OK, now this is not necessary (as we will do this in the final product) but to successfully end this part, I hit Command + A (select whole canvas), then Command+ Shift + C (copy merged), then Command + V (paste), and added Filter > High Pass of value 1. Then I turned the Blending Mode of this merged layer to Overlay. This way we get a nice sharpened outcome.

Conclusion

It’s great what you can achieve from scratch, having just two textures and a woman’s face. The outcome is complete for now. To get the piece done, first we needed the place and main motive – character. So here it is. Now that you have the overall look, we can start planning what kind of effects we want to fill this illustration with, to make it fully complete. And for this we will take care in Part 2. Check it out soon!

Thanks for reading the tutorial. You can view the final image below.

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How to Create Cityscape Concept Art

Miguel Santana da Silva — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:33:51 +0000

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to easily create a successful piece of cityscape concept art. We’ll be using a very basic 3D scene as a foundation for the piece, then taking it into Photoshop for some creative photo manipulation of reference photos, basic painting and adjustments. Let’s create this urban scene!

Final Image Preview

Tutorial Details and Requirements

3D Program: Any application capable of rendering a daylight system will do. I used Maya in this tutorial.
Lots of reference photos: This will be covered in the steps below.
Photoshop, and an Intermediate understanding of its tools and terms.
Graphics Tablet: Not essential, but very useful.
Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced
Estimated Completion Time: 8-10 hours

The Brief

The brief, in my case, was to create a historical street scene from anywhere in the world before 1914. It wasn’t to be a particular street, but the concept had to serve the purpose of seeming as though it could be a real street in the time and place I chose, to have a sense of architecture and light, and overall atmosphere.

Obviously you can do anything you want for your projects, but for the sake of the tutorial let’s roll with my choice, which was Glasgow (Scotland) in 1900.

Step 1

The first thing to do is to gather lots of visual reference. Just because you’re doing Glasgow in 1900 doesn’t mean you should only be searching for photos or paintings of Glasgow in 1900.

You should be looking at the work of traditional painting masters, contemporary painters and concept artists, photographers, sculptors, arch-vis studios, etc. This will get you thinking about color, composition, lighting, and so on. All of this can be found online, in books, television, newspapers & magazines, and generally just about anywhere. If something inspires you, retain it somehow! I could sit here boring you with lists of incredible work you should look at, but that would take up a whole article in itself…

I can’t emphasize enough how important reference material is, because without it, you’re working blindly. And more often than not, the work you make up in your head will be ten times weaker than work produced with well used reference. Just about any successful concept artist will tell you this.

Another great way to gather visual reference, is of course to capture it yourself! Below for example, are a couple of photographs from a batch I took in London.

Step 2

Beyond the general inspirational type of reference, it’s a good idea to gather the more practical and useful type of reference material. By this, I mean actually photos of Glasgow in 1900 we can use to help build our scene in the later stages.

In my case, I found an incredible resource through the AMICA Library, which is a free service for searching all sorts of arts from all sorts of periods, but you have to pay a premium to access the full resolution images.

Here, you’ll see that I came across images from a fantastic book by photographer Thomas Annan called "The Old Streets and Closes of Glasgow," from 1900. It is these images precisely that we’ll eventually cut up and manipulate in order to add texture to our scene. You can find the images here.

Step 3

Once you have all your reference images and are roughly sure what sort of image you’d like to create, it’s a good idea to do lots of thumbnail sketches. You can use a pencil or paint directly into Photoshop. These thumbnails were painted using some of Photoshop’s default brushes set to pen opacity, but I’ll go into brushes a little later on.

For this you should work quite small, and spend the smallest amount of time on each one. Speed is key! If I can remember correctly, these were drawn in between 30 seconds and two minutes. This way you really have to figure out the composition and main idea of the image rather than getting caught up in the details.

Don’t be scared to do this step. I’m not a great painter, but you can see in some of the thumbnails below that they are simple yet complex enough to convey the idea for a scene.

Step 4

Now we’ll actually start working on our final piece. Open up Maya (or the program of your choice), then create a polygon Plane. Make it quite large, so it can act as our floor.

Step 5

Next, create a cube on top of your plane, this will be the template for our other buildings.

Once it’s created, press the Insert key. This will turn your manipulator into a slightly different icon, and will allow you to move just the pivot point of your object. In a side view, move the pivot point to the bottom of your cube (you can change viewports by pressing the spacebar whilst hovering the mouse over a viewport to maximize it or zoom out to 4-panel view). This will mean when you scale it, that it won’t really scale below the floor, but instead it will grow outwards from the bottom.

Once that’s done, press the Insert key again to get out of pivot point edit mode.

Step 6

Once you have your basic cube setup, you’ll need to start placing duplicates around the scene to create the street.

To do this, select the cube and press Command + D to duplicate it, the W key to move it, and the R key to scale it. Do this enough times until you have something like the image below.

Don’t try and align things perfectly, the charm of these kinds of streets is the chaotic asymmetry and variation.

Step 7

Now that we have a basic street setup, we’ll create a simple daylight system. Open up the render settings and under the Render Using drop-down, choose Mental Ray. Then, under the Quality tab, choose the Quality Preset called "Preview: Final Gather."

Step 8

Still in the Render Settings window, go to the Indirect Lighting tab, and next to Physical Sun and Sky, press the Create button.

Step 9

The daylight system actually created a Directional light to act as the sun. This light may be hard to find by eye, so go to Window > Outliner. In there, you can see a list of all the elements in your scene. Scroll down until you see something called “sunDirection,” then use the move and scale tools to place it somewhere a little easier to see and manipulate.

Note that these types of lights don’t change according to their size or position, only the rotation will affect the appearance of light.

So, to manipulate the light, press the number 7 on your keyboard, which activates the light preview mode in your viewport, and rotate the sun light until you are happy with it. Don’t be scared to experiment with this and produce a few test renders. I wanted my sky to be coming almost against the camera, so I positioned it similar to what you can see below.

Step 10

We’re going to make our camera slightly more interesting by giving it a wide-angle view. In your viewport, click on View > Select Camera.

If your Attribute Editor isn’t already up, press Command + A. Then, under Camera Attributes, type 18 in the Focal Length parameter.

Step 11

When you’re happy with your angle, go to the Render Settings once again, and under the Common tab you can change the size of your render output. In my case, I was working with A4 size, so I put those dimensions in, but feel free to choose your own.

Then under the Render menu, press Render Current Frame. You should end up with something similar to the image below!

In the Render View, press File > Save Image. Save it as a nice, high-quality Targa file.

Then, create a new Photoshop document (again, A4 size in my case) and paste your rendered image in it.

Step 12

This is where it gets fun!

Start by opening up your reference photos, and thinking about which pieces of the photos can go where. You can then start by using the Polygonal Lasso tool to make selections around rectangular patches of your reference images that vaguely resemble the angle at which you want to paste them over your render. Once a selection is made, Command + C to copy and Command + V to paste on your document with the rendered image.

At this point, don’t worry too much about scaling up small reference images, it will hardly be noticeable in your final result. Once you have a patch of buildings pasted in to your scene, press Command + T to Free Transform, and use Command+click & drag on the corners of your sample images to manipulate their perspective roughly into place. Set the blending mode to Overlay, Multiply or whatever else works best. You can also play around with opacity.

Again, don’t feel the need to be very precise. It doesn’t matter all that much if some of the perspective appears to be wrong, it’s a very loose concept, and the images are only there to establish an idea of architecture and surface texture. These mistakes will be covered up in the later stages anyhow.

One thing you should be very cautious about is scale! Try and picture a human standing in the street (paste one in, if it helps!) and work out if there is anything too unrealistic compared to the person in scale.

This is a very organic process, I can’t tell you exactly where to paste each image, but I hope you get the idea of the process!

Step 13

The next step is where a graphics tablet really comes in handy. That’s because we’ll be doing some actual painting! The custom brushes I use 99% of the time are the "MyBroosh" and "Oil Pastel Large 3," which are included in the free brush pack kindly provided by artist Daarken on his website. You can find the brushes in his fantastic Tutorials section.

Step 14

Don’t be put off if you haven’t had any previous digital painting experience. We’re not painting a whole scene, but rather just adding bits of detail and tone to blend the photo elements together.

Make sure you work in new layers when doing things like painting, so that you can always delete all your brush strokes without damaging the material underneath.

As you can see below, you just need to add random tone and detail all over your scene, without being too precise. Just remember to consider the light source, so that you add highlights and shadows in the right places. On the second image below, you can see just the painting layer pasted over red, so that you can see the black and white strokes. I hope you can see just how messy you can be with this!

Step 15

A good, cheap way to add color information without painting it, is to use existing photographs or paintings. For example, I really liked the color and light in this photograph by Leo Rubinfien, so I just pasted it over my document, stretched it to fill my whole canvas vertically and set it to Overlay, at about 67% opacity. Then, I just erased the top part of the image so that it didn’t go into the sky.

Feel free to experiment! A lot of times these experiments will go wrong, but the mistakes are worth it just for the few times when they work.

Step 16

You should then start to establish the light and shadow areas a bit further, to tighten up the scene. Once again you can see just the new painted layer pasted over red. I set the opacity of this layer to around 84%.

Step 17

If you feel the need to, go ahead and keep adding more bits of texture and architecture to your scene. In this case, I’ve placed a few more windows and some chimneys around the scene, since it was looking a bit too box-like.

Then, start to add more tone by creating a Gradient Map adjustment layer, setting it to Soft Light and about 11-15% opacity. I used the gradient "Yellow, Violet, Orange, Blue." I also added a yellow/orange grunge texture found at designshard.com and set it to Soft Light, at about 22%.

These steps are by all means not absolute. Again, they aren’t exact values and resources that will work with every image, so by all means experiment until something works for you. I’m just hoping to share the method of creating this particular image, and that will hopefully give you ideas when creating your own.

Step 18

Create a new layer and start painting a few brush strokes in orange-ish and red tones, with the layer set to color, and about 40% opacity. Since the image was leaning mostly to cooler tones, I thought this could add some of color balance and variation.

Then, I add a new Curves adjustment layer, and create a slight S curve on it, to darken the shadows and brighten the highlights.

Step 19

To accentuate the shadow and sun-lit tones further, create a new layer and fill it with a gradient going from an orange to a blue tone, as you can see in the image below. Then, set this layer to Overlay at around 10% opacity.

You can then add another yellow/orange grunge texture, much like the one previously mentioned, and set it to Soft Light at around 34% opacity.

I also thought I should mention that even at this stage, I kept adding architecture reference photos in where I thought they were needed to add more detail.

Step 20

We’re nearly there! Just add any last minute subtle Gradient Maps or any other adjustment layers. Then, create a new layer and fill it with Mid-Gray, and go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Depending on your image size, adjust the percentage so that it’s just a very subtle effect, and tick the Monochromatic box. Set this layer to Overlay at around 60-70% opacity, or until it looks right to you.

Then, flatten your image and apply an Unsharp Mask filter to taste!

Conclusion

You can now do whatever you want to it, I just added a white border over a black background, and a bit of text, but the presentation is up to you.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. I hope this tutorial has been insightful and inspirational.

As you can see, you don’t have to be a great painter with years of experience to create successful pieces of concept art. Can’t wait to see what you guys come up with. Good luck in your future creations!

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How to Enhance Photos With a Pen Tablet

Alex Beltechi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:04:07 +0000

Have you ever come across a photo where all the highlights and shadows seem just too good to be true? If it’s not HDR processing, it’s pen tablet magic. Find out in this tutorial how to give a regular image a subtle, artistic feel with some clever brush work. Read more after the jump!

Final Image Preview

Video Tutorial

I created these videos to compliment this text + image tutorial.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is download this photo of a tiger. Paste it in a new blank document (1575px by 1055px at 300 dpi). Rotate it and place it as shown in the image below. Also, while having the background layer selected press Command + I to invert it to black.

Step 2

Now it’s time to separate the tiger from the background. We also want to fade the image out gradually, so the most efficient way is to do both of these tasks at the same time. By changing the background color to black, all we have to do now is erase portions of the tiger.

To avoid any damage to the photo though, we’ll do that through a Layer Mask. With the tiger’s layer active, go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. From now on, anything you paint within the Layer Mask with black will disappear. If you feel you’ve erased too much, paint with white to bring back parts of the image.

It’s important that you do this with a tablet and at very low levels of Opacity. The idea is for the transitions to be very subtle, so sometimes when painting over dark regions with white, 1-5% Opacity is best to work with. For this step, begin to darken the background of the image to black. Use something around 10% Opacity.

Step 3

Eliminate as much as you can with the background, but don’t go over the tiger itself.

Step 4

Reduce the brush size and go right up to the outline of the tiger. Try not to completely erase the whiskers. They’ll be difficult to bring back if you’re not sure where they are.

Step 5

Now use a large brush and cover the left side of its face and the top of the body. Add a little black on the lower part too.

Step 6

Now change the forward color to white and bring back the ear by painting over it with 100% Opacity.

Step 7

Change to black again, lower the Opacity considerably and darken the center of the ear.

Step 8

Darken the neck by focusing on the stripes. Leave the white portions somewhat visible.

Step 9

By now, only the tiger’s head should be visible, and portions of the neck.

Step 10

With 1-5% Opacity, bring back some of the white parts of the chest area. Fading out the body shouldn’t be abrupt and uniform. Since its fur is not flat, you’ll still be able to see some of the white parts of the neck.

Step 11

And that should be it for separating the image from the background. Because the background color is solid black, it looks a bit odd now, but it will look just right with a few Adjustment Layers at the end.

Step 12

Now it’s time to add highlights and shadows. In this before and after photo you can see the basic principle of everything we’re about to do from now on.

On a separate layer, use white as the foreground color to paint linear highlights. To add contrast, switch to black and darken in the same way. You’ll have to judge where you think all these will apply, so it’s not an exact science at all. A more reflective surface like the fangs will have thinner and brighter outlines, while the tongue will require a more spread out reflection.

Step 13

Paint a white stroke along the margin of the tongue. Also, add a touch of white over the center, but don’t just use a large brush size. Use a 2px brush on low Opacity and paint according to the texture of the tongue.

Step 14

For the fangs, paint along the edges and a bit near the center.

Step 15

The reflection of the nose is different from the white lines we’ve created so far. Instead of painting straight lines over the center of the nose, lower the Opacity even more and paint with a circular motion of the hand.

Step 16

Don’t forget to add highlights on the lips and on the inner side of the cheek.

Step 17

Give the nose a well defined outline too.

Step 18

Now change the brush size to 1px and give those highlights a sharp feel.

Step 19

Don’t forget the top of the head too.

Step 20

With the same 1px brush size, paint shadows this time

Step 21

Darken the left side of each fang. The boosted contrast will make them look more impressive.

Step 22

Add similar shadows to the entire mouth. To add sharpness to these effects, paint dark areas along side white ones.

Step 23

It’s time to switch our attention to the entire head. Change the brush size to around 80 and add shadows to the white parts of the head.

Step 24

It’s time to draw some digital hair on the darker portions. Grab a 1px brush on a very low Opacity (1-5%) and paint thin, curly lines that resemble the fur. You may need to do this over several parts of the image. Below is a close-up.

Step 25

Draw a thin, jagged line across the top of the head and edge of the ear.

Step 26

And that’s it for the enhancements! Your image should now look something like this:

Step 27

Finish the image, we’ll add a few Adjustment Layers. The first one’s a Selective Color effect. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Selective Color. Double-click on the layer’s icon to bring up the settings. From the drop-down menu, find Blacks. Change it as shown here below.

Step 28

Now find the Yellows and change the settings as follows, then Press OK when you’re done.

Step 29

Add one final Adjustment Layer: Gradient Map. Bring up the settings by clicking on the layer’s icon and click on the Color Gradient bar. When a second window opens, click on the first gradient from the bottom row. Change the first color (Violet) to a dark blue: #121929. Press OK and change the layer’s Opacity to 10%.

Final Image

All done! Here is the final version below.

Conclusion

The true potential of this technique lies in its versatility. You can use a tablet to enhance just about any photo. Below is a before and after example of how I enhanced a portrait image of a man.

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How to Create a Traditional, Chinese Ink Painting Based on a Scenic Photo

Alex Meng — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:12:53 +0000

Try a breath of ancient Chinese art and culture! With these simple intuitive steps of manipulations, you will learn how to create an original traditional style Chinese painting, which has an archaic charm just beyond your photo. Even with these basic Photoshop skills, you can quickly find a path to make a beautiful fairyland. So let’s hit it!

Final Image Preview

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop CS4
Difficulty: Medium
Estimated Completion Time: 1-2h

Step 1 – Preparing for the Paper

Open a picture from your photo gallery; you must be able to pick out a beautiful scenic one. For Psd Plus can use the “source_mountain.jpg” image (shown below), provided in the “source” file of the Plus download.

Although the image looks pretty good, it does seem to still be missing something. In order to show its tremendous vigor, romantic color, imaginative beauty we’ll add a waterfall to it. The image shown below is available to Psd Plus members as well. Or you could choose your own waterfall image.

Open the waterfall image and Select All (Command + A). Copy and paste on previous as another layer. Under the Layers panel, adjust the Opacity to 75% in order to make visible to place it on a right place.

Go to Edit > Free Transform (Command + T); Click on the bottom-right, drag the handle and hold Shift to resize the waterfall until it is fits the mountain peak. Be sure that they can match perfectly and the water will fall down through the cavern.

Create a layer mask on "Layer 1," and then use a basic brush with smooth edges (black color) to erase some of the parts to make the borders disappear.

To create a layer mask on it. Use the brush sizes shown below. Set up the brushes and erase the waterfalls borders.

After you’ve done that, restore the layer Opacity to 100%. The color of "Layer 1" is different from the “Background” but that’s OK. Press Shift + Command + Alt + E to merge all of the visible layers into a new layer names "Layer 2." Here, you have finished the canvas.

Step 2 – Inking the Paper

Pay attention to five basic elementary inks of traditional Chinese painting shown below: clear, light, weighty, strong and adust.

On "Layer 2" go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and set to 5px. Feel out of focus? Don’t worry. Change the layer blend mode to "Soft Light." That’s OK!

Copy "Layer 2" twice (Command + J), and both with "Soft Light." You will get two layers: a "Layer 2 copy" and a "Layer 2 copy 2." The image below shows you the layers in detail.

For another worthy change on this artwork; merge all of the visible layers (Shift + Command + Alt + E) again as "Layer 3." Simultaneity go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate (Shift + Command + U) to make it looks like a Chinese painting. WOW!

But only a resemblance here, what we want is the similarity in spirit. With the five images shown below, you can find the differences between the layers you’ve just added.

Step 3 – Lighting Up

Traditional Chinese ink painting often expresses her beauty just with blank space. So "light" here is the most crucial thing. However, in our landscape almost all are pictures, the biggest flaw precisely is the difficulty to represent space.

That is the most serious part in the exchanging between photos and ink paintings that I have advocated. First, you should deal with the body of the mountain with Dodge Tool (default foreground/background color). Outline the terminators on the stone; details given below.

Still feel something rigid and stiff? With these problems you can use my
usual approach to undertaking. Command + J to copy a layer as "layer 3 copy" and Gaussian Blur set to about five pixels. Set the new layer’s blending mode to Multiply and reduce the Opacity to 70%. That’s it (see image detail below)!

You may as well take a brief look at the magnificent Morbidezza – my favorite waterfall. To make beautiful blank space, merge the clouds in harmony with the sky by applying a Levels Adjustment Layer. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels…

Set the points numbers as shown below.

Below shows where our painting has progressed so far.

Step 4 – Making Chromatic

You may not believe it when I say Chinese ink is full of color, but that is a fact. If you won’t brush on the mountain some color, it won’t be pointed up and lively. Create a new layer for coloring up and use a zero hardness default brush.

The first color we’ll use is pastel yellow orange. Paint as shown below or as you’re instincts freely dictate.

The second color we’ll use is a pastel pea green. Cover most yellow area and just leave a little yellow on the edges.

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and use 50px or whatever suits your taste. Once you have blurred the image, set the layer blending mode to Soft Light. I think the color on such paintings is caused by inclusion in Chinese ink, which brings verisimilitude on the mountain again and again.

Step 5 – Filling Blank Space

At the bottom-left of the picture, the vacant area can also contain some more details. After scanning my entire library, I finally found good material.

Copy the file “source_material.jpg” (located in the Plus source files) as a new layer into your PSD file. Adjust its size and location using the Free Transform Tool (Command + T).

Hold Shift + Alt + Command + E to merge all the visible layers into a new layer. Then use the Dodge or Burn Tool to erase some of the edges, or deepen some to knock off the boundary with a brush just like you did in Step
1. The next image shows you how to select these items.

Erase edges, blur boundary, and fill some blank space.

Now deepen the upper layer.

Step 6 – Adding a Poem

Li Bai’s poems are known for their freedom and naturalness of expression. So we choose him (the image “ancientpoem.jpg” is available in the Plus source files).

Due to both the writing and painting area being white, you can even
directly copy and paste as a new layer. Go to Edit > Free Transform (Command + T); Click on the bottom-right and drag the handle while holding Shift to resize it until it just fills in the top-right blank space.
The poem has a white boundary. I use the Quick Selection Tool to select the white area, then press Shift + Command + I to inverse the selection to select the letters quickly and easily. Now resize as shown.

Step 7 – Finishing the Painting

Once again take a few minutes to sit back and check out the piece as a whole. Feast your eyes on the beautiful, spiritual scene.

I took a 2 px brush to draw three birds.
Adjust levels again until you’re satisfied.
You can draw some small hills below the poem and summerhouses, human beings in the mountains and so on. Pay attention to the colors and
gradients.
Do not try to make your drawing paper covered with whole paint. Chinese painting is always particular about blank areas in the interpretation of its beauty.

Conclusion

Congratulation you’re finished! I really hope that this tutorial was useful to you, and that you’ve learned some new techniques, or found inspiration from what you’ve accomplished. You can see the final result below.

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Create an Intense Movie Poster in Photoshop

Alex Beltechi — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:52:05 +0000

Designers love to be critical about movie posters, and while you may think you have better ideas about how to sell a movie to an audience, how many times have you actually tried doing it? In this tutorial, we’re going to create a poster for a fictional movie called "Fugitive." The movie is meant to be a suspenseful thriller that features one’s escape under the cover of darkness, despite man’s attempt to capture the lone hero. Thin and cheesy plot? Check. Awesome opportunity to better your PSD skills? You got it!

Final Image Preview

And here it is; the poster we’re about to do! I could have just used a dark forest photo for the background, but where’s the fun in that? This tutorial is not about finding the shortest route to an end, rather striking the balance between how real you want the setting to look, and cinematic/artistic at the same time. You want it be compelling and truthful, but also control the viewers attention and amount of information they’re given. You don’t want to spoil the movie, but entice someone to come see it.

Take a look at the poster we’ll be creating. Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. You can view the final image preview below.

Video Tutorial

Our video editor Gavin Steele has created this video tutorial to compliment this text + image tutorial.

Step 1

Let’s start with the background. I used the largest available version of this photo, but just about any foggy forest image will do. Typically, we’d be working on an A4 or A3 canvas, but for the sake of spending less money on resources, we’ll create a scaled down version of an A4 canvas. Not only that, but we’re going to create a large background image that we will ultimately crop into a final movie poster. So for the first part, create a 1680 pixels by 1819 pixels at 300 dpi and paste in the forest image. Make a similar layout.

Step 2

We’ll now add a series of Adjustment Layers to change the appearance of the photo. You can find them under Layer > New Adjustment Layer. The first one is a Hue/Saturation with Saturation set to -54.

Step 3

Next, add a Curves Adjustment Layer. Drag the curve as seen in the screenshot below.

Step 4

Now add a Selective Color Adjustment Layer. From the drop-down menu, select Blacks. Use the settings shown below.

Step 5

In this part, you need to establish a light source somewhere on the canvas. It’s a good idea to add a dot where it will be so that you have a better idea of where the highlights and shadows appear.

From now on you’re going to need a pen tablet. You can also do this with a mouse, but the pressure sensitivity makes all the difference. Use the Burn Tool (O) with Exposure set on 15% to darken the darkened portions of the tree trunks. See this before and after image for reference.

Step 6

Do this for each of the trees. Remember that the trees aren’t perfectly flat, so keep the burn pattern "bumpy."

Step 7

Use the same settings but with a much larger brush size to darken the bottom of the photo.

Step 8

Now add highlights on the trees with the Dodge Tool (O). The larger highlight should be on the side of the light source. Then a second, thinner one consits in light that gets reflected from the surrounding objects and environment.

Step 9

Once you’ve finished all the highlights and shadows, use a soft brush to draw the light source as a faint, cyan glow.

Step 10

Erase portions of the glow that cover the more up-front trees.

Step 11

From the layer menu, click on the Add Layer Mask icon. Press D on your keyboard, then go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Then go to Filter > Render Difference Clouds. This will hide portions of the glow in an irregular, cloud-like manner. You can see this process in more detail at Step 17.

Step 12

On a separate layer, paint a stronger cyan glow.

Step 13

Lastly, paint a smaller white glow on a separate layer. If you make it too intense, lower the Opacity of the layer.

Step 14

The next job is to add some reflected light on nearby trees. Start by painting thin strips of color on a trunk.

Step 15

Use the Smudge Tool (R) to soften up the glow.

Step 16

Smudge it until it looks like in the screenshot below.

Step 17

Just like in Step 11, add a Layer Mask to the layer by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon. Make sure you have the Layer Mask selected by clicking on its icon, then go to Filter > Render Clouds. To make the clouds have more contrast and better defined edges, go to Filter > Render > Difference Clouds.

Step 18

Repeat the process for all the nearby trees. The closer the light, the stronger the glow.

Step 19

Now create a new blank layer above all the other ones and create a few very faint spots on the canvas with the same cyan.

Step 20

Again, use a Clouds Layer Mask to hide portions of it.

Step 21

Now we’re going to create an anamorphic lens flare. People are really quick to criticise the use of lens flares in digital work, and due to constant overuse, they’re easy to hate. But the fact is that they do exist, and can be a great asset to a design. Rather joining a hate trend and condemming this effect, I suggest you study it and find ways to do it right!

Anamorphic lens flares appear from artifical light sources (such as fog lights) which are obviosuly very appropriate if you’re trying to create the illusion that someone is being chased by people in the night. It also adds contrast and a focal point to the design, thus becoming a key element in telling the story of this poster.

Use a small, soft brush on low Opacity, hold Shift and draw a light streak from side to side that converges with the light source.

Step 22

Use the Pen Tool (P) in Path Mode to draw the new location for a secondary light streak.

Step 23

Choose the appropriate brush settings and with the Pen Tool active, right-click and go to Stroke Path. In the following menu, choose Brush and check the Simulate Pressure box, then press OK.

Step 24

Create three of these with different widths. You determine the width by choosing different brush sizes before stroking the path. You should create these three on the same layer.

Step 25

Command-click on the layer icon to make a selection of it or go to Select > Load Selection > OK.

Step 26

Use a large, soft brush on a light cyan color to give this detail a highlight.

Step 27

Add a few more thin lines at different sections of this beam of light.

Step 28

Next, on a separate layer add a simple dot of about 20 px with a hard edged brush. The go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and blur it until it looks like the one below.

Step 29

Now add a darker and larger beam over the other ones.

Step 30

Make a selection of it and give it a highlight too.

Step 31

Finally, add a soft, white glow in the center and to the side of the tree. Give it a low Opacity.

Step 32

Now we’re going to alter the scene again, so that the light appears more realistic. On top of all the layers from the Layer Menu, create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer. Find the Cyans and use these settings, and don’t press OK just yet.

Step 34

Find the Greens too, boost everything to max and press OK.

Step 35

Add a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer and from the drop-down menu, select “Black & White with Green Filter.” Press OK and set the layer’s Blending Mode to Color Dodge and Opacity to 70%.

Step 36

On top of these, add another Selective Color Adjustment Layer and change the Cyans to the settings shown below.

Step 37

Add one more Channel Mixer on top, as shown below.

Step 38

And a final one (for now) – Levels Adjustment Layer.

Step 39

Your scene should now have a similar appearance to the one shown below.

Step 40

Now we’re going to enhance the appearnce of the trees by giving them very thin reflective areas. See the three trees on the left? Thy all have a 2 px soft line drawn on the right side. Do the same for your trees with a dark cyan color.

Step 41

Repeat this process for all the trees. The farther the tree, the less prominent the line.

Step 42

Now on a separate layer, draw some pure white ones. Keep these shorter though, and fewer.

Step 43

You’ll now need a medium size version of this photo. Position it in the composition.

Step 44

There are multiple ways to cut out this person, but the safest and most flexible way I use is to paint a Mask Layer with a tablet. Below is a black and white view of my Mask. Cut out your character as well, so that he only holds a branch in his hand.

Step 45

Position him underneath the Lens Flare details, and slightly to the right of the tree.

Step 46

We’ll now match the character’s darkest values to the scene by adding a Selective Color Adjustment Layer. Once you’ve dragged the Black value to -3, press OK and make it a Clipping Mask (Alt + Command + G).

Step 47

Next up is making the shadows. Create a new blank layer and draw shadows cast by the bright light with a near black color.

Step 48

It’s finally time to create the actual poster! Like I said before, an A4 poster means a lot of pixels. You can use smaller resources to keep your budget down by creating a new document that keeps the proportion of an A4 format, but at a smaller resolution: 1024 px by 1449 px at 300 ppi. Copy a merged version of the scene (Command + Shift + C) and paste it in the new document. Position it as shown below.

Step 49

A crucial part of any movie poster is the movie title and its typface. I used what I think is a good reflection of the concept. The tall faces of ITC Franklin Gothic Book Extra Compressed complete the idea of being illusive, sharp and cunning. The flat look is there to balance the piece and make sure that the poster does not become overly photoshopped. The simple white appearance provides contrast for an otherwise dark poster.

It’s what I think is appropriate, but what would you use? Speaking of overly used stuff, I give you "Trajan!" I’m really curious to see what typeface you would find fit, let me know in the comments what you think would work better.

Step 50

For a more cinematic look though, I decided to horizontally Motion Blur a duplicated version of the font.

Step 51

After you give it a Motion Blur, you’ll notice that the top edges are pretty harsh. Soften them up a bit by adding a smaller blur on the vertical axis.

Step 52

Then just set the layer’s Blending Mode to Pin Light and play around with the Opacity.

Step 53

A typical appearnce of text on movie posters is very large tracking, or spaces between the letters of each word. You know how poster sometimes have the phrase: from the creator of this-and-that movie? Well I gave this design a humorous slant on that.

Step 54

Another common phrase is based on actual events, or something like that. Below is this true tale.

Step 55

And finally, a few other details like the movie website, release date (in this case the day I finished the poster – wouldn’t it have been cool for me to do this on the date of 09.09.09?) and movie producer logo.

Step 56

On the top layer, add one last (I promise) Adjustment Layer: a Channel Mixer where you slightly change the Blue values.

Step 57

To create the branches, we’ll use a very cool brush set that you can find here. Paint a few branches on a layer that’s underneath the Channel Mixer.

Step 58

Erase portions that you want to appear hidden behind the letters.

Step 59

Now use a 2 px white brush again to add the reflections. I think the branches are a lovely touch of detail, without compromising the message. After all, it would be strange for him to be hold the only thin branch in the forest, right?

Step 60

A final effect is a partial Motion Blur on the edges that is just right for giving a sense of urgency and motion. Press Q and with a large Black & White gradient, drag a radial gradient from the center to just a bit past one of the lower corners of the canvas.

Step 61

Make sure you have the background layer active and go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Once you’ve done this, do the same for the branches, but add a bit more distance.

Step 62

And as a final touch, paint a few shadows for those branches over the letters. You can do that by painting with black in a new blank layer, making it a clipping mask for the letters and changing their Opacity to a low 15%.

Final Result

And the poster is now finished! I’d love to see your own movie posters, so be sure to put it in our Flickr group if you come up with something!

Here is a secondary version I made after the first one, in desktop format.

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How to Create a Fantasy “Mother Nature” Scene

Jürgen Heiss — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:04:08 +0000

This tutorial is about creating a fantasy scene called “Mother Nature.” We will use well chosen images, brushes and most off all our imagination in combination with Photoshop techniques to create an outstanding image. So let’s get started!

Final Image Preview

Video Tutorial

Our video editor Gavin Steele has created this video tutorial to compliment this text + image tutorial.

Preparation

Before you start take a look at the images we’ll be using:
Model Sarah Ellis by Marcus J. Ranum,
Forest by PandoraLore-Stock,
Painted Hair by trisste-brushes,
Fantasy-headwear by unholy-stock,
Bird by emo-kiddo-stock,
Butterflies I by SeraphimStock,
Butterfly Brushes by bmjewell-stock, and
Greencheek in flight by greencheek.

Step 1

Open the Forest image provided by PandoraLore-Stock. Double-Click on the layer to unlock it, so that we can make modifications in the next steps. Rename the layer to “forest” and save the file under the name “MotherNature.psd.”

Step 2

Import the Model image provided by Marcus J. Ranum into our scene.
Create a layer mask and mask out the background so that just the woman is visible on our forest background. You can use either the Pen Tool (P),
the Magic Wand Tool (W), the Quick Selection Tool (W), the Magnetic Lasso (L) or even a simple Soft Brush with a black color to mask out our model.

Just paint with a black color on the layer mask over the background from the model and the background will disappear. Note that if you paint with a white color on the layer mask, you can paint in parts from the original images again.
Press Command + T to switch to the Transform mode. Scale and move the woman until she is positioned like in the image below. Rename the layer to “girl.”

Step 3

Select the Smudge Tool (R). Choose a small, soft brush about 10-20px with 10-15% strength, then smudge carefully over the arms and face of the model. Change the brushes size on smaller parts like the eyebrows or the fingers. Doing this will make the skin look smoother and cleaner.

Step 4

In the following steps we will add some awesome hair to the model. First, remove the ivy and parts from the hair. Now simply paint with a black color on the layer mask to hide them. Create a new empty layer over the “girl” layer and select the Brush Tool (B).

Load the Painted Hair brushes provided by trisste-brushes.
With a black color click 2-3 times on the new layer to create the first part of the new hairstyle.

Press Command + T and rotate the hairs to fit the head of the woman. Finally, you can can switch one more time to Transform mode using Command + T. Now choose Edit > Transform > Warp. With the Warp Tool you have the possibility to control the hair flow even more accurately. You should end up with something like the image below (I used a gray background here so that you can see the hairs better).

Step 5

Duplicate the “Hair” layer (Command + J), press Command + T and move the new layer into position so that the result looks similar to this image below.

Step 6

Since simply using black hairs would look boring for our image, I decided to use a second color. Choose #9ac33e as the foreground color and paint a new strand of hair on a new empty layer over our tow existing “hair” layers.

Finally, you can erase the hairs that goes over the face of the model. Also, play a little with the eraser opacity and erase some green hairs here and there. Doing this will make the black and green hairs flow more natural together. Now use the Transform and the Warp Tool again to position the hairs as you please.

Step 7

We’ve already made a good start on the hairs ,but there is still a lot of work to do until our hairs look like a believable hairstyle. Select all of our three “hair” layers and flatten them by pressing Command + E. Press Command + J on the flattened “Hair” layer to create a duplicate of it. Move and rotate the duplicated layer so that we get better looking hair.

Step 8

Create a new layer on top of our “hair” layers and paint some black hair strands that go over the woman’s left shoulder. Like always move and rotate them into place. Finally, add little green hairs like we did in the previous steps. You should end up with something similar to the image below.

Step 9

To finish up the hairstyle of our model we’ll paint some green hair strands and bring them into place. Now paint for last time some black hairs strands over the green ones. When you are happy with the hairs, select all the “hair” layers and flatten them by pressing Command + E. Rename the flattened layer to “hair.” The final hairstyle should look similar to the image below.

Step 10

Import the Fantasy-headwear image provided by unholy-stock into our scene. Delete everything accept the crown in the center of the imported image, then move this crown on top of our existing layers. Scale the crown down until its size fits the size of the girls head.

Press Command + T to enter Transform mode. Press Command while click-dragging the corner points to move the crown into perspective. Finally, create a layer mask for the crown and choose a small, soft brush. Now paint with a black color on the inside of the crown so that we can see the face of our model again.

Step 11

To give the crown a final touch we will paint in some kind of jewel.
Simply use the Elliptical Marquee Tool and stroke the outside with a very dark gray (1px). Fill the inside of the ellipse with red #c52418. To give the whole jewel a look we will use the Burn Tool (O) to darken some parts. Finally, set some highlights with the Dodge Tool (O).

Use the Dodge and Burn Tools with a low exposure at about 10%. In the image below you see the step to create a jewel. Scale and place the ready jewel in the center of the crown and create four more duplicates using Command + J as shown.

Step 12

Flatten the whole “jewel” layers into one by selecting them and pressing Command + E. I think the crown will look better if the jewels have different colors. Create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layers over the jewels.

Use the values from below or choose your own color if you prefer. Now click on the layer mask and fill it with a black color. With a small, soft, white colored brush paint over the jewels which should get the new color. Repeat this step one more time with another Adjustment layer and a different color.

Step 13

OK, now it’s time to add some animals around “Mother Nature,” otherwise she wouldn’t be Mother Nature. We’ll start with a bird, which will sits on her right arm.

Import the Bird image provided by emo-kiddo-stock. Cut the bird out from his background and place him on the right arm of the girl. Use Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal so that the bird is facing at our Mother Nature. Scale him down until he has a realistic size.

Step 14

Since this is a fantasy image, I want the bird also to look more fantasy like. We will do this with the help of the Smudge Tool (R). Use a spatter brush with a size between 10-20px. Smudge the bird with a strength about 10-20%. When you are ready, set the strength to about 80% and smudge the tail, wings and beak. The result will be a bird that looks painted.

Step 15

OK, now it’s time to add some lipstick to our girl. I think green will fit perfectly for her. Take a small, soft brush. Choose #577615 as the color and brush over her lips on a new layer. Set the blend mode from the new layer to color and lower the Opacity to about 60%.

Step 16

To perfect the face of our Mother Nature figure we will also add some eyeshadow. As in the step before, paint with a green color on a new layer. Now choose a light yellow color and paint with an Opacity of around 20% carefully over the image. Blend the new layer with a color and lower the blending Opacity if necessary.

Step 17

In this step, we will give the face the final touches. We’ll add some diamonds to her eyelids. Create a new layer above our “makeup” layers (“lipstick,” “eyelids”) from before. Choose a small, soft brush (6px) and a dark gray color (#343434).

Follow the contour of the eyelid and make about 6 or maybe 7 points there. Now lower the brush size to 3px and choose a very light green color (#e0eebf). With the new color place small highlights into the gray points. Do the same for the second eyelid as well.

Step 18

OK now we’ll add some butterflies around the model. Create a new empty layer and select the Brush Tool (B). Load the Butterflies Brushes provided by SeraphimStock and the
Butterfly Brushes provided by bmjewell-stock.

Place approximately eight butterflies around our Mother Nature figure. Feel free to use different colors and choose the butterflies that you like the most. Place them for example on her dress, leg, arms, or hairs so that they interact with her.

Step 19

Import the Greencheek in flight image provided by greencheek.
Use the Pen Tool (P) or your preferred Selection Tool to cut out the bird from his background. Switch to Transform Mode (Command +T) and move the bird into position.
Scale him down till he gets a realistic size. The bird should look like he will land in just a few second on mother natures arm.

Step 20

In this step, we’ll make some further adjustments to our flying bird. Create a new empty layer above the “bird” layer. Choice Edit > Fill, under Contents Use choose 50% gray. Press Command + Alt + G to create a new clipping mask. Set the blend mode to Soft Light. Choose small, soft brushes about 10px with 10-20% strength.

Now you have the possibility to paint in shadows or highlight depending on if either you are using a black or a white color. You could get the same results by using the Dodge/Burn Tool (O) instead, but with the method I introduced you, you work non-destructive. This means you don’t need to work directly on the “bird” layer which is a very helpful!

Create a new Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer on top and lower the Saturation to -27. Press Command + Alt + G to create a clipping mask from our Adjustment Layer.

Step 21

Alright we’re almost done. Select the layer with our girl and create a layer mask if you didn’t already. Select the layer mask and paint the leg and parts from her skirt out. Simply use a small, soft brush and make sure that you use a black color. Look at the image below as reference.

Step 22

Create a new empty layer above the model layer. Select the Clone Stamp Tool (S), make sure that you sample from the current and below layers. Try to clone some parts from the skirt to get the effect that the skirt is hanging over.
Look at the image below to get an idea. Also, try to avoid sharp edges like in the first image. Simply go over it with a soft eraser and an Opacity of around 35% over the sharp edges.

Step 23

Now we will match the background with the rest of the image. We’ll use a technique from before so it should be very easy to follow this step. Create a new empty layer above the “forest” (background) layer and fill it with 50% gray. Set the blend mode to Soft Light. Grab a Soft Brush with a black color and lower the Opacity to 30-40%. Start to paint on the gray layer to darken the highlights.

Step 24

In addition you can give the whole image a color tint or use curves to darken the whole image slightly. This depends really on your own taste. If you want you can add your signature to brand your image. You can use either a Graphic tablet or some font like Scriptina.

In the image below I used curves to darken the whole image. On a new layer I painted with different green colors over the left bottom so that the ground there looks greenish instead of brown. As a blend mode you can use Color or Soft Light. Finally, I added my signature.

Conclusion

Our journey is finished and I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial. And of course the most important is that I hope you learned a lot of new techniques.

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How to Create an Original Pin-Up Girl in Photoshop

Ron Davey — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:07:43 +0000

In this tutorial, I will be taking you through the steps that I do when creating a cartoon pin-up. I will start off with thumbnails and continue on to the final image. Along the way, I will be sharing with you my techniques and thought process when it comes to creating an original image with Photoshop. Let’s get started!

Final Image Preview

Step 1

Thumbnails! This is where I try to find the pose that I’ll get a kick out of doing. Open a new file (8 inches by 10 inches 400 dpi) and just start sketching with a standard Brush (B) set at 50% Opacity and with black as the default color. Even though I am doing this all digitally, there are still times when I like to sketch on paper using anything from a ballpoint pen, to pencils or markers. They are after all just thumbnails and don’t require any sort of care.

The most important thing you’re looking for in a thumbnail is composition and in this case, a great pose. In other words, just keep it loose and don’t worry about details. A good tip is when doing thumbnails think of the silhouette. If you color in the thumbnail solid black, does it still have a strong visual? Can you tell what’s going on? These are important questions and if the answer is yes. Then you’ve found your thumbnail to proceed on to the next step.

Step 2

So now, I’ve found a thumbnail I want to work with. I then start a new Layer set and call it "Sketch." I also move the thumbnails into their own Layer set called "Thumbs."

For each new version of the image, I always start a new Layer so that I can always make changes. This Layer is called "Ver_01." I then enlarge the thumbnail to the size I think will work. From here, I start to flesh out the character more and get the general pose and proportions down. This is still done quite loose, I know you’re chomping at the bit to get doing detail, but this is the time where you will see if this pose will work. I’m happy with this one and so I’ll keep going.

Step 3

My next step is to start tightening up the proportions. For each new version of the image, I always start a new layer so that I can always make changes. This layer is called "Ver_02."

So I figured out what I want to do with the hair, I then start tackling the hands and gun. I thought at first two guns with silencers might be cool, but decided against it. I also wanted to try and draw the hands in a different position than what I normally would do.

Remember, always have fun with your drawing, but try and push yourself to try different things. In the long run, you’ll better yourself and become a stronger artist. I’ve decided at this point, that there won’t be any sort of detailed background…going strictly pin-up on this one.

So now I’ve got the preliminary drawing done. The next step is to get the details in, so it’s ready for inking.

Step 4

OK, now I focus on getting everything where I want it so I can start inking. I again make a new layer called "Ver_03." I made some final adjustments to the proportions and details like the belt, gun and her eyes. I’ve also changed things here and there like the hands and the hair.

Even though this is the final sketch before inking, you don’t have to tighten it up too much since your doing it yourself. Whereas, if you were giving this to another person to ink, you would need to make clean crisp lines and indicate what you’re thinking for inks.

Step 5

Now make a new layer called "Linework." The way I ink my drawings is by using the Pen Tool (P). Up until a few years ago, I refused to use the Pen Tool. That’s because I didn’t know how to use it correctly. Now that I know how, I can’t even imagine how I survived with out it.

Select the Pen Tool and make sure the Paths box is selected and not Shape Layers. One thing to make sure is that you have a layer selected. It can be a source of frustration if you have a layer set selected and not the actual layer as it will not stroke. I’ve created an action to stroke the path and delete it afterwards, it just makes things easier. You can control the size and pressure of the stroke using your brush options.

Below is the final inked version of the image. I’ve made some changes in the inking stage. As all artists know, you’re never quite happy with an image and are always looking to improve it. I removed some details in the hands and added some in the hair and gun. I’ve also cropped her legs off and made some proportional changes. Once you get the hang of the Pen Tool (P), you’ll find it easy to make changes in the inking stage. Now we’re ready to move on to color, finally!

Step 6

OK, so this is probably the easiest step of them all. In this step, all I do is figure out the colors I want to use and fill them in. I name this layer "Base" for organization purposes. This layer will be the bottom layer when it comes to the character. The only other layers that will appear beneath this one are the background layers. I also at this point make my background layer a middle gray. This just helps see the colors better against a neutral background.

Step 7

It’s always best when painting, whether it’s digitally or traditional, to work from dark to light. So in this step, I start laying down the darks on a separate layer named "Darks." Separate layers allow for changes to be made if needed. Generally, I never nail the intensity of the shadows on the first try. Later on, after I’ve painted in the lights, I often find I need to adjust the darks using the Hue/Saturation tool (Command + U).

When painting, I use a combination of Gradient (G) and Brush (B) tools (as shown above) to achieve the desired outcome. I will lay down a gradient to get a nice shadow base and then tweak it with the brush. I also will play with the opacity and hardness of the brush to get a soft look if needed.

Shown below is the final darks, for now. As I said before, I most likely will be adjusting them with the Hue/Saturation tool (Command + U) at a later stage.

Step 8

I’m happy with the darks and now have moved on to the lights. Again, I create a new Layer and name it "Lights" and place it above the "Darks" layer in the layer tab. I then begin to lay down the lights over the character. I use the same technique as I did for the darks. I like the highlights to pop, so I generally will make them brighter than they should be, especially with the hair.

Step 9

Now that I’m happy with the darks and lights, I like to create a reflective light layer. This is for some bounce light that might be reflecting on your subject from the background or light source. So like before, I create another new layer and name it "Reflect." I’ve already decided that I want to use a hot pink color, since it will work well with the colors of her clothes. So I use a standard Brush (B) with a slight softness to it and hit the spots where I want the light to show.

Step 10

I’m almost finished, the only thing left to do are some minor details and add a background. When I finish an image, I like to get rid of the harsh black outline and do a colored line version.

So what I do is Command-click on the “Line” layer to select the line work. I create a new Layer and name it "colored line." I then hide the original line work and start hand painting the new colored line work in. I like to do it manually as it still makes me feel like I’m traditionally painting. I like the look the colored line gives, it’s soft and it doesn’t flatten your image as much as a solid black line does.

Step 11

Alright, I’m at the final step. I now add a background element to my image to finish her off. I get rid of the gray background and replace it with a solid color.

I’ve also decided that a nice circular shape around her will work nice and make her pop. In the circle, I use a nice soft gradient to accentuate certain areas a bit more. This is the time where I will resize the image and also adjust the lights and darks if needed.

The final touch is a nice outline around the entire character to really make her stand out. I don’t always do this, but it seems to suit this image nicely. In order to do this, I create a duplicate of my file and flatten the base and line work layers (Command + E.) I then select the shape (Command-click) and go to Select > Modify > Expand. The number of pixels you enter is a judgement call, I use 2 pixels. On a new temp Layer, I fill it in (Alt + Enter). Once I’m happy with the thickness and color, I then (Shift-click) and drag the outline back to the original file and voila – nice solid outline!

Conclusion

Well, that’s it! I try to keep my workflow simple and not to rely on a lot of fancy tricks. The tools I used in this tutorial were the Pen Tool, standard brush and a lot of undos!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and have learned somethings you might not have thought about to designing a pin-up!

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