Show us your art! (unfinished works, layers, etc.)
Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2015 1:52 pm
So this idea came out of a discussion of colouring techniques on Tailsteak's Livestream, and looking back on my entry for 2012's contest, I thought it it worth showing you all how it was made. This varies wildly from artist to artist, but my approach was to draw it fully on paper, then colour it digitally.
Here is that pencil drawing, freshly scanned. I haven't yet done anything to it yet except maybe trim the edges. This will be the layer that goes on top. Now here is the interesting part:
This is the colour layer, well actually 33 different layers. The background is a single layer, but every shape in the foreground is a layer of its own. Gina's dress, the gold bits on the daggers, even Jaehab's red eyes. They're all layers.
But put both of these parts together, and you get this:
So what did it take to blend these layers together? In this case I used the Photoshop blending mode of 'hard light'. Applied to just the top layer, this allows the colour to bleed through from the layers below.
Also makes the whole image darker, so watch out for that.
Of course I didn't cross my fingers and hope they lined up perfectly. I was looking at the top layer all the while as I painted the other layers directly onto it (except they were below, but you get the point). The blending effect shows in real-time while I'm doing this.
I may have done some polygonal lassoing to set some of the colour boundaries, but that usually takes too long, and the entire colouring stage took 2 and a half hours tops. It was by far the quickest part of the drawing. For most of this work I used a Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop CS4.
What about you - what do you use? And More importantly, how do you use it?
Here is that pencil drawing, freshly scanned. I haven't yet done anything to it yet except maybe trim the edges. This will be the layer that goes on top. Now here is the interesting part:
This is the colour layer, well actually 33 different layers. The background is a single layer, but every shape in the foreground is a layer of its own. Gina's dress, the gold bits on the daggers, even Jaehab's red eyes. They're all layers.
But put both of these parts together, and you get this:
So what did it take to blend these layers together? In this case I used the Photoshop blending mode of 'hard light'. Applied to just the top layer, this allows the colour to bleed through from the layers below.
Also makes the whole image darker, so watch out for that.
Of course I didn't cross my fingers and hope they lined up perfectly. I was looking at the top layer all the while as I painted the other layers directly onto it (except they were below, but you get the point). The blending effect shows in real-time while I'm doing this.
I may have done some polygonal lassoing to set some of the colour boundaries, but that usually takes too long, and the entire colouring stage took 2 and a half hours tops. It was by far the quickest part of the drawing. For most of this work I used a Wacom Bamboo tablet and Photoshop CS4.
What about you - what do you use? And More importantly, how do you use it?
