hmm…having decided to cut a bit the posting on some forums anyway, I though it would make more sense if I published HERE before anywhere else any new work. And since the format allows it, I’ll throw in some little things that someone might find interesting (or I could find interesting, in the future when looking back). So preliminary sketches or as in this case, when there isn’t much of a sketch on paper besides the two characters (who were anywhere sketched on two different pages), the work in progress. I wouldn’t call it tutorial, as I don’t think that a) I’ll go in depth enough to be of any use, and b) I’m not a teacher and don’t really feel I’m in the position nor I’d have the purport to be one.
Anyway, this is something I did very much in between things; the two characters were lazily sketched separately, then I though they’d go well “together” (having very opposite characteristics of the same part of the body), and the setting was something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, therefore in London and with a detailed animation backdrop feel opposed to more cartoony characters. But as I said, it was very much something I did on off-hours, without giving much thought to it. But I did decide to do a screen capture every now and then.
Hence this series of work in progress pics: first of all the brush I used mainly for this, I tend to change the minimum diameter a lot as I go, depending on what I’m drawing (less diameter variation when drawing buildings or inanimate objects), and I prefer keeping a good angle variation to give it a more ragged look.
Since there was no real sketch for the background (or anything I’d could effectively use besides noting to myself what could go there), I did what I rarely do..I sketched directly in Photoshop. I rarely do so because although I’ve got better over the years, I’m still no way as precise and loose with a tablet than I am when sketching with a pencil on paper. In short, I’m not “digital art native”, which in a way I don’t really mind. For the sketch I used basically the same brush, with a 20% gray, and freely sketched just to get the proportions and positions right (and some values). Then I “placed” the two characters scanned from the sketchbook.
After this I started working in grayscale, as I personally found that besides helping with values and finding the right lighting effects, it keeps me from worrying too much about colours, and getting the thing pretty much done before I address that aspect. It’s like cooking, get the mise-en-place done before getting the pots and pans on (but remember to heat the oven beforehand).
A lot of things in life are like cooking. But I digress.
After a cleaner outline (it’s really a shame that you can’t rotate freely the canvas in PS as you do in Painter or Sketchbook pro though), I start with the grayscale, and getting the different parts clearly defined. I do this because recently I’ve been going towards keeping separate what I do on a computer and what I do on canvas (or generally speaking by hand). Therefore not mimicking that oil painting process which sometimes makes a lot of things look the same. I’m not a precise person, therefore sometimes I feel the urge to spell out that what I do on a computer I would have never managed to do it on paper, AND viceversa (I’ll never get that random chaotic mess on computer…too many layers and undoes. The story is old, I know, and I digress again. And I quote, of course).
I do the same with the two characters, and then proceed with switching to RGB (no, not CMYK. CMYK is so 90′s). I know good sense should tell me to do things on lots of layers, but I couldn’t really be bothered. So I do a copy of the background layers – instead of having a colour one in overlay or similar above the grayscale one – and tweak the colour balance. After that I start playing around with the “replace colour”. I found recently that by using this tool you get more interesting results than with the colour balances, curves etc, as within a certain section and colour range you can pick up different effects based on slight variations in value. Once I have a more or less balanced out the composition (without exaggerating with colour variation, I’ll leave that for later), I add a “full colour” layer. It’s the layer where I forget everything I’ve done before, and just colour freely as one would normally do. It’s where one adds the colours that stand out because of their own nature (eg. prints, sources of light etc), and tweaks all the things that didn’t really work out before. i.e. afterthoughts.
Pretty much the same happens with the characters. Actually the order of the last few pics doesn’t really follow the real workflow (it’s just the layers on/off), as I do flip more in between the various characters and background, especially once on the “full colour” layers.
The last thing is the texture. Here I didn’t use much of a texture on the background (a slight paper one at the end I’ve been using since Angelskin times), as anyway it turned out quite rich as it is – adding texture here would be mixing flavours, that work on their own but don’t really work as a whole. Ok I admit, I’ve been watching quite a lot of Masterchef recently…. But I did with the characters, especially with her coat. Ah, btw, the thing that started it all (the picture) was a coat I saw in Camden a few weeks ago with a friend, in a kind of retro stylish shop in the Stables market. It just stuck out, therefore all the rest was actually drawn “around it”.
Including the noses.
r.
