Tutorial Glory

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Alright chumps pay attention. It's time you learned how to rock. And I'm here to show you the way.

Nah just kidding. But here's a tutorial, or at the very least, a walk through with how I run through photoshop.

First, since most of you have photoshop, that's out of the way.
Next, you're best off getting one of these.

Not to brow beat you about the glory of wacom tablets (though they are glorious), that's how I work, so that's a key part of the process. Trying to color with a mouse is like trying to staple papers using your bare hands and no stapler. In my opinion at least. It is not a tool to be underestimated, put it that way. Yeah, they're expensive but once you get one, the learning doesn't stop.



Use an ellipse shaped brush. Take a circle brush, and narrow the sides slightly so it's not a perfect circle, but, an ellipse. Check 'other dynamics', and set Opacity Jitter and the Control as Pen Pressure for both fade and opacity.

I use that brush for painting. But first let's start with a drawing. For a drawing, I just start with a solid opaque black line brush. So nothing special.. Although I might set shape dynamics-->size jitter with the control set to pen pressure. So, a black line that varies in weight depending on how hard you press down.

Alright, so, draw something.
This requires skill of course, practice makes perfect But you gotta start somewhere so hop to it!



Okay, so there's a drawing. Now we start coloring.

Fun Fact: Coloring on top of white is 9/10 times, bad. Don't color on top of white because the whole time you're fighting the white of the canvas. Same rule applies to real painting, you're best starting out putting some kind of a dark wash over the canvas before you start painting. So I throw a dark blue or red (depending on the overall tone I want for the piece)...


Then throw down the base colors you want. Your *flats*. Constantly keeping in mind where your light source(s) will be, where light is coming from, how it affects the shape of your figures, environments, etc... Lighting and shadow is what gives an object three dimensional form, so be sure to stay consistent and to draw from life, studying how light affects 3d objects.

Just keep building it up all together at once, don't get locked into any one area. Personally, something I picked up from John Foster (look him up on conceptart.org), is he never zooms in more that 100%. I think this is pretty smart, and helps you always keep the big picture in mind, and really, anything minute will get lost if you're rendering it at higher than 100% anyway.




Just keep building it up gradually. Sharpening up the edges, tightening up the graphics a little bit. You know.


Nearing the finish, by this point I've got enough information in the rendered piece to phase out the line drawing. Your lighting and shapes should be strong enough that it can stand on its own without linework..

-The background isn't much, just a starry sky. I use some custom brushes and some some scattered and textured shapes to make the starry sky.
-I add some textures to the character's armor (select textures in the 'brushes' palette/tab), and lightly apply them.(which you can make or create with scans or photos or just draw some and save them as textures. select someting, go to 'edit' then--> create custom brush or custom texture.

I set my brush mode to color dodge, or linear dodge (the effect varies) to pop out some highlights and bump up some contrast here and there. Don't abuse this though, too much can make a painting go bad reaaaalll fast.



And taddah, awesome.

DO's


-Handpick your colors
-Build up your painting all at once.
-Get to grips with some understanding of light and from
-" " " " " anatomy
-" " " " " color theory, color hierarchy
-" " " " " composition
-Use reference photos if you're not sure about something. And even if you do have a pretty good idea, take references just to be sure and to help your art.

DONT's

-Use dodge and burn to shade and highlight.
-Get caught up with small parts of the painting and ignore the whole
-Just make shit up if you really have no idea what you're doing. There's no shame in following references, that's what the pro's do. Had to get that through my head at some point as well.
-Compartmentalize your colors. Move your colors around to keep some balance. Red in your blue, blue in your red, so on.
-Let your piece get too saturated.
-get discouraged. All pieces go through an ugly phase. If you have to, take a break! let your eyes take a rest, focus on something else for a while or you'll get frustrated and it's not fun anymore.




Hope this is some help! Have at it.

[SuperLuigiBros]

Dang it, I gotta spread some rep around before I can rep you again. (and by golly, ill do just that).

I just started colouring something in using this technique a few minutes ago, but I came here to check out that self portrait you did. Finding this was way cooler!

I have a couple of questions though... Where do you download your brushes from? I used to have a whole heap of good ones, but then i stumbled across a whole bunch of shitty ones and got rid of them all so now im stuck with the default PS brushes.

Did you use a default PS brush for the texture (lines) on his cape? If so, which one? And did you put that texturing on another layer with a blending style, or just a sort of transparent black thing on the same (or different, i suppose) layer?

Everyone should +rep LaLiLuLeLo2003

[HPK]

Well, this is nice to see. I'll have to give your techniques a go sometime since I really like your painting style. I might just have to keep that line art, though. Sketchy lines = awesome, in my book.

[Oddyssey]

Whoa great tutorial!

[BigfootGus]

awesome tutorial, now i just need photoshop, one of those tablets, and some skillz

[LaLiLuLeLo]

People would share brushes on art forums and junk that I frequent, but that was ages ago and you'd be hard pressed to find 'em again. You can check eatpoo.com or conceptart.org for brush threads or 'tips and helps' threads for brush downloads. But if you ask nicely I can IM you some. Also, a lot exist in photoshop, you just gotta dig through them all. I spend a bunch of time just customizing the shit out of some of the default brushes. with the brush selected, right click on your canvas, then press the little tab that branches out into a menu for those brushes, and there's the different kinds. I went through most of those picking ones out that I could use or tweak. And you can create brushes as well.

[Raitei]

Cool... just cool

[Spatula]

That's beautiful.

[Crow]

great work, reminds me of Casshern

[SuperLuigiBros]

Another question...

In your last thread (the self portrait one), how did you go from the sketched lines of the robe to the textured final one? Did you smudge with a textured brush or something? Or did you just blur the 'flats' and use a textured brush some other way?

[LaLiLuLeLo]

I actually have photoshop open right now, so I'll explain that in a sec.

[SuperLuigiBros]

Awesome. I have a small project to do for uni where we did a life drawing and then have to colour it in photoshop. Its just a boring apple and some cloth and a glass, but Ive never coloured anything in before in photoshop. Im going to use the same technique to draw a nice big detailed picture later one...

Hmm, Im getting off track. Ive put all the rough flat colour in the picture, i just have to make it all detailed and stuff.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

I use the same ellipse brush with that opacity jitter to blend colors together. Notice that a lot of stuff still looks kinda painted and colors don't all blend perfectly together if you really look at it. If the texture is realllly smooth and would benefit from it, I use the 'air brush' or ellipse brush with hardness taken down to O% You want to avoid this brush as much as possible until you've got some solid techniques down. It'll crush a drawing with blurry smudgy mess.
Just use it for after touches.



But yeah, just patiently painting those colors together is how I smoothed it out. Just takes a little more time.
For the texture I used, a brush with the 'texture' box checked, and a canvas like texture in a few places. It's subtle but you can see it.

For the dominant texture I used this.



You should be able to find it if you search the brushes thoroughly, it's in the 'faux finish' brushes. Just take some time aside to dick around with most of these, customize 'em, whatever. See what works.

Setting the brush mode to dodge or multiply is how I draw texture high lights or shadows...


When you're done with that apple post it so I can critique how you did

[XboxEvolved]

Really neat stuff

[SuperLuigiBros]

So this is my thing with the flat colours only. I think the apple and the garlic looks kinda alright, but everything else is sort of only half done. Keep in mind that the apple is sitting in a glass cup which i havnt bothered with yet... I dont know how Im going to tackle that bit... But you can see where its supposed to be.

I was fiddling around with some brushes and things and I just dont know how to blend it all together. So you use the same brush, but with the opacity jitter and just keep going over and over it?

I still need to sharpen the red cloth up alot, at the moment it just looks like a big mass of reds and purples. I dont know how to do that bit either...

Hmmm.... Any ideas on how to go about doing this?

(also, I just noticed that when I take it from my other computer to this one, it loses alot of the colour. I guess my other screen is super bright compared to this one )

...And I cant see how you got this one to look like how it does. Arg. Ive only just started to use the brush tab up the top there.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...titled-2-1.jpg

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Are you coloring on a white background? If you are, I'm gonna break your spine.

Anyway, couple things I noticed- use bigger strokes. Too many small strokes, when you can just use fewer, larger strokes. so, bump up your brush diameter.

Where's your light source? It looks like it's all over the place, like boring room lighting, or a flash photograph. If you're drawing from a photo, take a picture without flash. set up a strong light source.



I made this up real quick to try and figure out where you were having difficulty.



And I'm pretty sure it's the things I just mentioned. Use bigger strokes, way bigger. This will allow you to use fewer strokes. Half the trick (and by trick I mean, the way it fools your eye) is that I'm not using so many strokes at all, or smudging or blending everything together, just using a large brush size. the base color was like 3 or 4 strokes to get the shape down, and establish the first light source.

Fewer, bigger strokes.
and
don't color on top of white backgrounds. the reason for this, is that the color background supports your other colors otherwise you're fighting the white.

If I were to show you the apple I just drew without the dark red background behind it (which I can't since I did it all on one layer without thinking, it wouldn't be opaque. But you can't tell because the color behind it reinforces it. With white, you're constantly fighting the white of the canvas, like colored pencils.


also, your shadows are getting too dark too fast. Um...don't jump to dark darks and blacks right away. They're bad. And keeping in mind that nothing in reality is stark white or pure black. Nothing.
And with that, I have class. bbl.

[Carlos]

Whoa. Nice thread.

Once I get my new desk, and new computer, I'm getting that wacom.

[HPK]

Indeed.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

not bad hpk, love me some ninja turtles. but like I told the cube, use bigger, fewer strokes for your coloring. And while you're at it, experiment with the color of your light sources. Doesn't always have to be, in this case, green, light green high light and dark green shadow. You could have a bright blue high light, or a bright red highlight, and a dark purple or dark blue shadow. try it.

[HPK]

More experimenting with the painting style.

Of course, it seems that I have ignored your advice, LaLiLuLeLo. It isn't that I ignored it---it's just how I do things. Besides, I'm not trying to replicate your style. Also, I can't work with bigger brushstrokes when using the computer. Strange.