 |
 |
|
Create a document of desired size and make a new layer. You can create a new layer by clicking on the little black arrow in the upper right corner of the layers tab (above "Opacity"). The second option on this menu will be New Layer. Name it anything you like. I named it sketch.
|
|
 |
|
Loosely sketch out the drawing that you would like to create. In this stage, it's fine to make mistakes. Create your sketch in a color other then black. This is so that later, when we ink in black or a dark color, it's easy to see what is sketch and what is finished line. If your sketch is black and final lines are black, you won't be able to see where you've inked!
I used a small 5 pixel hard brush to sketch with for thin lines. My document is 300dpi, so 5 pixels is a very fine line to work with. |
|
 |
 |
|
Create a new layer on top of your skech. This is the layer you will put your final lines, the digital "inking" on. Using black (or whatever color you desire your linework to be), take a small, hard edged brush begin carefully tracing over your sketch. At 300dpi, I personally use a 5 pixel wide tapered brush. Find a size that works for you! Zooming in when doing your final linework is a great help.
I use Photoshop with a pen pad called a Wacom Tablet. The pen pad uses a pen-like stylus and is pressure sensitive. The images to the left show you how the pen pad operates. It can take hard brushes, and when you use the pad, will make a thin line when pressed gently, and a thick line when pressed firmly. This is how I get the subtle thick and thin line variation in my final linework. Learning to make smooth looking lines is not easy. You will need a lot of practice. The best advice I can offer is to ink large. Even if there are imperfections when you zoom in, zoomed out, it should look very crisp! |
|
|
Begin painting in your flat colors under your inking but above your background. Using a hard edged brush will give you thick color that will completely obscure your background. This is great! When you begin, you can save time by only worrying about edges that matter. If the blue of this characters skin overlaps the unpainted hair, no worries! When I paint the hair, I'll paint over it. Where the blue butts up against the background however, I want to get that very crisp and precise; there is nothing that will be painted on top of it to fix messy paint.
|
|
Once all of your first color is down - in this case, the skin - lock your color layer. This will make it so that all the transparent parts of the layer - the parts where there are no paint - remain transparent. Pull out a wide, soft airbrush and lay in general shadows. Do not worry about details. This is the stage where we establish the lightsource and basic forms.
|
|
One of the default Photoshop brushes is the Pen Opacity brush. This brush, like the soft airbrush, will change how much paint it puts out based on your pen pad's pressure. The difference is that it has a harder edge. Using this brush, it's possible to get semi-soft, semi-hard edges depending on how hard you press. It's my tool of choice for achieving the digital coloring look I use. I use the base color (the light blue) and the color I used to shade with in the previous stage (the medium blue) to further define shapes within the face. I change the size of the brush manually as I go along, since the pen pressure does not affect this particular brush.
|
 |
|
Using the soft airbrush I used to begin shading, and the pen flow opacity airbrush I used in the previous step, I then take a blue that's slightly darker then my shadow, and a blue that's slightly lighter then my base color, and add the finishing shadows and highlights to my skin layer.
| |
|
|
With the skin complete, it's time to repeat the process all over again with a new area of color. Creating a new layer for your next set of flats enables you to lock it after the flats are down, and thus have an easier time staying in the lines when you begin shading. Because the hair is very close to white - the previous background color - I paint bucketed the background in a dark color. This makes it easy to see if there's any holes or color smudged over the boundries of my lines when I paint.
|
|
I shaded the hair using the same technique as the skin, and repeated the entire process on a new layer for the eyes and tusk. It is now time to begin thinking about the background scene or colors you would like to go behind your image.
|
|
I paint bucketed in the background a navy color, and then browsed through the photoshop brush menu until I found one that intrigued me. For this simple background, I worked around the character, pressing harder around the edges that came near where she was. This was incredibly fast to do, and gives an eye catching result!
|
|
You may want to give your image a lookover before you call it finished even though all parts may be filled in with color. Does everything look like a single piece? In the case of this image, I decided that the character and the background didn't look unified, so I brought some of the purple from the background into the character herself. After you've put in your finishing touches, you can flatten a copy of the image and save it for the web!
Here is the full size version of the completed image at 100% scale.
|
|
