At this stage, it's time to man up and marry the bitch because we're going to commit. What I mean here by commitment is the composition is locked, anatomy and perspective are accurate, and the 'big picture' is what you're going with. Not much more experimenting past here because most, if not all, big problems should have been solved by now. This isn't to say that everything here is absolutely final final, because I still find small things that need to be nudged this way and that, but for the most part, you have to have made your decisions.
Now, when I'm rendering, I keep my left hand on specific hot keys to make the whole process run faster. With the brush tool selected and flow turned down, alt (eyedropper) to select in between colors to blend, x (switch foreground/background colors) to 'save' a color if I don't want to go through the trouble of finding it again, space bar to drag myself around and around, and ctrl+z (you don't really need me to explain, do you?) in case I make an oopsie. These keys are pretty much all I need for the bulk of painting, and conveniently grouped in the lower left of my keyboard.
Remember that I'm not tell you that this is the right way; there's no such thing. This is just the process I find most comfortable to my style and technique.
1. I usually need something playing while I'm working, whether it's a movie, TV series, music, whatever. Yeah I'm one of those people. Since I only have a tiny laptop computer, all this has to be compressed on this screen. I'll invest in a dual screen machine soon enough. What a joyous day that will be, Photoshop on one side, reference and stoned Sir Michael Caine on the other.
2. Navigator helps me move around my painting, especially when I'm zoomed in at the later stages. It's just easier to get to where you need to go rather than clicking and dragging across miles of pixels with the hand tool. These three menus are hot keyed to f1, f2, and f3 respectively, so I can pull up the one I want when I need it, or hide them if they get in the way.
3. History lets me maneuver through my last 20 moves to spot exactly where I recently fucked up.
4. Can't paint in Photoshop without the help of trusty layers. Every time I need to try something new, or am unsure if something will work or not, I do it on a new layer. If it works, I merge it down, if not, I can throw it away without a second thought.
1. I usually need something playing while I'm working, whether it's a movie, TV series, music, whatever. Yeah I'm one of those people. Since I only have a tiny laptop computer, all this has to be compressed on this screen. I'll invest in a dual screen machine soon enough. What a joyous day that will be, Photoshop on one side, reference and stoned Sir Michael Caine on the other.
2. Navigator helps me move around my painting, especially when I'm zoomed in at the later stages. It's just easier to get to where you need to go rather than clicking and dragging across miles of pixels with the hand tool. These three menus are hot keyed to f1, f2, and f3 respectively, so I can pull up the one I want when I need it, or hide them if they get in the way.
3. History lets me maneuver through my last 20 moves to spot exactly where I recently fucked up.
4. Can't paint in Photoshop without the help of trusty layers. Every time I need to try something new, or am unsure if something will work or not, I do it on a new layer. If it works, I merge it down, if not, I can throw it away without a second thought.
- 4a. Another benefit here is the ability to organize your painting. As you can see, I started the initial painting with lineart on a new layer (now lowered to 70% opacity for the final painting), color rough underneath the lineart to give me somewhere to start from, and then my paintover layer on top of the lines and color when I'm satisfied with the beginning stages. Because I do color and value at the same time, I also keep a desaturation layer mask that I can turn on and off on top of everything else so I can make sure everything still makes sense at a black and white stage.
Ah, damn, more text walls. Sorry. Painting time.
Mmkay, same thing as before. Big brush, mediumish flow, stay zoomed out. Basically I'm just fleshing out the groundwork I've laid down. What I'm doing here is just color picking colors underneath and painting them over the lines. Every now and then, I'll go and slide the color darker or lighter, and give some more color variation, and definition of form. Already you can see how I'm trying to diminish the tangent of the raven's beak and back.
I'm not concerned with covering every inch of the canvas. There's going to be holes here and there where the original color rough shows through. That's fine. I'm just going to keep painting on top wherever I feel my attention is required, and move on from there. Now that I have the big stuff blocked in, I'm going to go in and start fine tuning things. Here's where I start to worry about edge control; where I want to focus and sharpen, where I want to fade and blend, color temperatures, and so on.
Starting to blend here; remember, 100% opacity and 20-40% flow. All it requires is a little patience to push the colors back and forth. The main reason I enjoy working with flow over opacity so much is that it gives me greater control over my edges. I believe edge control is very important in getting a painting working. It informs the viewer of focus, depth, texture, and generally makes it overall more pleasing to look at.
That's enough painting for now. I should probably do some other homework. See you next time as I continue to slave away!
I'm not concerned with covering every inch of the canvas. There's going to be holes here and there where the original color rough shows through. That's fine. I'm just going to keep painting on top wherever I feel my attention is required, and move on from there. Now that I have the big stuff blocked in, I'm going to go in and start fine tuning things. Here's where I start to worry about edge control; where I want to focus and sharpen, where I want to fade and blend, color temperatures, and so on.
Starting to blend here; remember, 100% opacity and 20-40% flow. All it requires is a little patience to push the colors back and forth. The main reason I enjoy working with flow over opacity so much is that it gives me greater control over my edges. I believe edge control is very important in getting a painting working. It informs the viewer of focus, depth, texture, and generally makes it overall more pleasing to look at.
That's enough painting for now. I should probably do some other homework. See you next time as I continue to slave away!


















