Painting Lesson With Uncle Ben Part 1

OK kiddies! I did promise to show you how I work so here it is. I hope this can be educational for you all, painting digitally can be tricky when you first start out. Heck the first couple turds I made should never see the light of day... EVER! Its a big help to know the program or how to use it. But you dont need to know everything, just enough to get you going. Over the years I just used a standard circle brush with the opacity on pen pressure. But as I got more comfortable I started to learn other tricks to add to my arsenal, so dont think you need all the tricks in the book from the beginning. Anyway here we go! If any of these dont make sense just ask me in class and I'll be happy to go through them with ya.


The linework is done and scanned into the computer and opened in photoshop. If the layer is locked and named as 'background' just double click it and press OK to unlock it. Now change the blend option to Multiply. This allows us to make the whites transparent so we can paint under the linework. Anyway, I start by blocking int he colours. This stage took long because its important to get the colours sorted before I render (paint to a refined stage) it up and waste time. So Im trying to find the right colours and trying to hint at what the values are. Think where your light source is (here its from the top right corner a lil behind the building). O, and dont be afraid to use reference for the perspective, lighting or colour. Even professionals use it, so if its good enough for them its good enough for me!


Starting the painting is always the hardest part for me. I need to see some promise that this will turn out good to have motivation to carry on. I couldnt quite see the end so I redrew the linework to something that offers a bit more interest and upped the contrast on the linework (by ctl+l you can vary the lights and darks). Now I can see a more solid drawing which convinces me that this is worth painting :P Before I could only see a chaotic splash of colours but with a drawing on top, I see some structure to the chaos. Its easier to paint if the drawing is correct. Throughout the painting process you'll have to fix so many things like colour, values, lighting, design. We're not smart enough to think of a way to fix the drawing at the same time ;)


OK, the hard part is pretty much done. We got the blobs of colour to guide us to a direction. Now we just paint them up into a refined stage. Basically I go in and add shadows and highlights to every area. It'll take a bit of experience to know where to go intense on the lighting and where to keep it subtle. But dont paint everything into a high contrast. Things that'll effect the way you render things are: lighting (is the light dull in that area or sharp?) and focus (is this blurred in the distance, something on the side we're not really looking at or right in our field of vision?).


More rendering. I choose different colours or different tones to seperate differnt surfaces or different elements. This helps things to 'read' clearer. Think of a lit cube... All the sides we see are a different gradient of gray, if they were all the same tone and colour we wont be able to recognize it as a cube.


Hmmmm... may be a bit advance for starters this trick. But I'll talk about it anyway because when I was told about it by a very helpful chap, I hardly did a painting without its help! Basically this creates a layer that'll turn everything under it to grayscale. How is that helpful? It allows you to check the values. If the values work, you can use any crazy colour you like. Thats something I read about and I think its true. As long as it reads in black and white, it can read in any stupid colour. So I use this to keep a constant check on how the form, lighting is going.
Now, this magical trick can be yours! All you have to do is give your uncle Benny a big wet kiss! ......... or you just go to the tool bar at the top and click Layer > Add New Adjustment Layer > Hue and Saturation. This window should open. Now, drag the saturation slider all the way down to the left and click OK. Taa Daa!!!!! Magic Value Checker got! You can switch it on and off like any other layer. Go nuts!

End of part 1. I'll put the rest up later. Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!