Welcome to part one of my walk-along tutorial of my most recent digital painting, "Halo". By reading this post and its continuation, you should gain an insight into what is involved in my process for digital painting, and hopefully this will help you to improve your own digital painting skills.
For this project, I used a Wacom Graphire3 tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS3. You should be able to do everything that I talk about with any recent tablet and any recent edition of Photoshop or a similar program. I spent close to 8 hours on this project over five days, including the time it took me to take notes for this walk-along, but it's certainly possible to produce better work in either more or less time than "Halo".
Set-Up
To start off, I set up the subjects of the painting in the computer lab in which I was producing this painting. All I had there was a piece of white canvas with a sheet of plexiglas set on a wooden table. On top of these I placed an LED flashlight, which provided the only real light source in this composition. After setting up the objects, I took a photo of them to use in the painting process with a 12 Megapixel Panasonic Lumix camera.
With the photo taken, I put the objects back, as I wouldn't be needing them for reference. While I do tend to use real-world references as much as possible for traditional media work (they are not constrained by camera resolutions or a fixed image perspective, after all), when painting digitally I find it much more effective to work from a digital reference photo. Also, I am unlikely to go above the resolution of the photo in my painting, simply because the file size would become quite unwieldy.
I use two monitors to work on paintings so that I can comfortably see both the painting and the reference photo at the same time. Since I was working in a computer lab at my school, that meant I had to use two separate machines, though I long for a time when I will be free to simply use a dual-monitor set-up. On the right monitor, I loaded the reference photo into Photoshop and activated the grid (spacing: 50%; subdivisions: 5). On the left monitor, I opened a new photoshop document (8x6 inches at 150ppi) and activated the grid, same spacing settings but with snap turned off.
Outlines
The first step I always take when making a digital painting is to outline the major shapes and lines visible in the reference photo. The grid lines were instrumental in this process as they allowed me to line up all of the features pretty consistently with the photo. I used the hard round brush at 4px diameter for outlining with both shape and opacity jitter set to "pen pressure".
The hard round brush is the main brush I use in my paintings, and I really feel that it identifies a painting as a digital work made in Photoshop. The other brushes are nice, and they do have their uses in some paintings, but the majority of the work is best done with the hard round brush at various diameters with size and opacity jitter turned on.
Outlining here actually took me about ten minutes, even though it looks rather simple. There was a good bit of erasing and redrawing lines that was involved to get it more or less accurate to the photo. Once the outlining step is done with, the grid lines can be turned off. At this point I switch from looking at the photo in Photoshop to looking at it in an image viewer because that displays it larger on the screen.
Blocking in Colors
It's always important not to get lost in the details of a digital painting right as you start. If you do, you'll usually end up skewing the proportions of something or spending days and days on a little one-inch by one-inch part of the painting and it will never turn out the way you want it to. Instead, the first thing to do is paint in the big areas of color so that you know where they are.
For this painting I chose to go with the rather limited "HKS N" color palette because it looked like it had colors similar to what I saw in the photograph. To give myself a wider range of options I also included pure black and pure white colors, but that's the extent of the options I gave myself this time. My brush size also moved up to 50 pixels for the block-in stage. Lastly, I created a solid background color layer (I suppose it could have just been in the actual "Background" layer, but it wasn't) and tried to approximate the color of the background of my photo using various overlay fills.
The best thing you can do to leverage the power of painting in Photoshop (besides remembering that there is an "Undo" command, that is) is splitting up your painting into layers. I don't tend to name my layers for paintings because they usually stay rather small and because multiple objects usually get painted on each one. A layer called "Highlights 3" doesn't really seem any more understandable than a layer called "Layer 12", especially considering that I can usually tell what is going on from the thumbnail in the layers window.
So, I created a new layer for my painting and started filling in the big areas of color. It's important to have the outlines layer on top while you are working so that you can see where the colors are supposed to go, at least for the first half of the project. After a point, the outlines stop being necessary and you can turn them off, but that point is still very far off at this stage.
I spent fifteen minutes working on these colors, and as you can see, I got a little ahead of myself trying to work on the fading of the light under the flashlight. When I stepped back a little from the canvas to make some notes, I saw three things that I would need to pay attention to:
- The base color of the painting looks now like it will be brown with a little blue and red accenting. This is somewhat different from the bluer tones of the photograph, but it may work out well. I'll have to see where it goes.
- The scratches and dust and other damage to the plexiglas plate in the photo might be a big problem for this painting. The hard round brush definitely isn't well-suited to paint in those features, so it'll take some experimentation.
- I may have chosen the wrong color palette for such a dark reference piece. Still, I'm going to stick with it because it should prove to be a challenge and I can darken the piece with black when necessary.
Recoloring
The fact that the photograph was a lot more blue than my painting so far was bothering me, so the next thing I did was to add in a blue overlay on the center of the painting. With reduced opacity, it got a lot closer to the color of the photograph, but I wasn't out of the woods yet.
I did some more recoloring work on the plexiglas and the flashlight, trying to get as close to the colors in the photograph as I could. I also worked on the actual halo itself coming off of the plexiglas, making it more blue. That made me realize how much I was being hampered in detail work by using such a large brush size. I put off work on that until after I increased the resolution of the painting.
This revision also featured a lot of low-opacity color layers to get the right effects on the plexiglas, and I moved the flashlight color onto a separate layer so that I could comfortably paint near it without risking mucking up its edges. 20 minutes of work yielded a pretty accurate plexiglas plate, at least in terms of the overall colors.
I put some more work into the flashlight, but it has proved extremely difficult to match up with the photograph. The object was just way too dark to manage nicely with this color palette. The only other major change in this pass was lightening up the table in front of the plexiglas. It doesn't look too accurate to the photo, but it's better than it was before.
End of Part One
This is roughly the half-way point in my work on "Halo", and seems like a good pausing point for the tutorial.
So far, I've covered how I begin to work on a painting, and the process of continually trying to get the color to match up with the reference photo. In part two, I'll be paying more attention to detail and dealing with a painting that has become quite large in file size.
