Friday 31 December 2010

Lily

Just a photo study from last Friday, from a photo by Jack Davison. Used with kind permission. (thanks! :))


Photoshop, about 2 hours. I used a technique similar to the one I used in Spaceborn, i.e. low opacity brushes with no pressure sensitivity. This involved a lot of colour-picking within the sketch (not from the photo!) from an initial limited palette of blue, brown, cream, green and red, and multiple brush strokes to get smoother blending for some areas, but overall speeds things up and helps me paint more deliberately. I varied opacity manually, at around 70% for defining features, 40% for most detailing, and 15% or less for larger areas of the skin. Looking at it again now, it's still a much sloppier job than Spaceborn, but I wanted to keep a messy look anyway; my main focus was colour to begin with. As a note, colour-picking WILL muddle your colours. A good way of countering that in Photoshop is to use a Vibrance adjustment layer at the end to make the colours pop a bit more, and a Curves layer to fix contrasts.

Progress shots:



Also, Happy New Year, everyone. :)

2 comments:

  1. I always pick colours and then increase saturation/brightness to my liking before blending.

    I used that method when I was first learning to paint as my tablet lacked pressure sensitivity XD

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  2. I love the intensity you achieved with this image.

    ReplyDelete