March 2008 - Posts
Moving forward to the monster, I continue the same basic methods, drawing shapes such as the eye, nostrils, mouth and teeth with the pen tool and rendering them in with the “grainy” airbrush. I turned off the grain for the teeth to keep them smooth looking. I used the Oval Selection tool for the eye and nostril masks.
One final technique variation I used here is Gel layer overlays to build up value on the monster. I just put flat color on a new layer set to the Gel composite method above the monster’s body layer. This will be transparent, and I can also increase or decrease the layer’s transparency to further control the value effect using the transparency slider on the Layers palette.
In this detail you can see how I put highlights back on top of the Gel layer on another regular opaque layer. These give a sense of form and reflected color and light.
I added the claws on still another layer above the monster’s body. I put final details on the telephone pole, hydrant, and water. For the straight lines of the wires I just set the brush to the straight line strokes option (button on Property bar or lower case v on the keyboard). I make final adjustments of color and value throughout the piece until I’m satisfied.
To sum up, I think one should remember that the real key to an illustration such as this is working on the drawing, style, and composition BEFORE you start to render it in on the computer, no matter what techniques you finally use. I often point out to my students that a common mistake beginners make is to rush to the finish too fast without doing preliminary planning. I call this “icing a cake before it’s baked”. A stylized image requires a different approach than a more expressive or reference-based picture.
I hope someone will find this information useful. I’ll try to post a new image and some pointers (although not such a long tutorial-whew!) monthly or so.
As I said earlier, one thing I like about Painter is how it can draw and import vector shapes. Not only do I use these to make my “friskets” or masks, but also to create clean graphic shapes.
An example in this illustration is the smoke coming out of the monster’s nostrils and behind him. I want these shapes to have a smooth, decorative curling, a look difficult to achieve and control with a regular brush. But once you’ve mastered the Pen tool, you can easily control and edit curves.
To start, I’ve set the tool to draw black strokes with no fills in the Set Shape Attributes menu.
Then I trace my sketch with the Pen tool as before, but in this case I leave the shapes with a stroke instead of converting them to selections.
However, I wish to soften these shapes as they are supposed to represent smoke. To do this I’ll need to convert them to one of Painter’s regular pixel layers rather than the vector Shape layer (indicated on the Layers palette by a circle and triangle rather than a stack of 3 rectangles). To do this you can click the icon on the Property Bar while in the Pen Tool or use the Convert To Layer command in the menu when the shape is selected.
Once I have done this I duplicate the shapes by clicking on them with the Layer Adjuster arrow while holding the Option Key (or going to Layer>Duplicate Layer in the menu). Now I have two of each smoke shape one on top of the other. I select the lower one and apply an Effect from the menu – in this case I use Focus>Soften to blur the shape.
The result is a soft haze around each smooth line.
I eventually color the lines and haze, and soften some of the lines above the blurred ones with the Photo Brush set to Blur and Diffuse Blur. This way I can just blur the parts of the top lines I want to rather than the entire line.
In the next part of this tutorial I’ll finish up the monster and foreground and make a few final points.
Once I have all the basic layers created, I start shading them in. Understanding shading and form are also things one must practice. This is my favorite part of image making. I usually imagine a light source, but I never get too obsessed with this – I have learned that the most important thing is to make a picture FEEL correct, especially a fantasy-oriented one like this. Edges need to stand out in the foreground and on important shapes, and can recede to create distance.
Here the obvious strong light source depicted by the fire has to be respected to a large degree, but you can still take liberties to make the overall mood and color harmony work for the good of the design and composition. It’s seldom a good idea to “zone isolate” colors to one part of a picture – they need to move throughout to create balance and unity, and to move the eye.
For instance, I use a lavender-blue color on the buildings in the distance, partly for design effect (I just like bright cartoony color!) and partly because city buildings are often cool colors, and cool colors tend to recede. Yet I also want to make sure they contrast well with the very warm flames behind them. I make sure to carry an accent of that blue into the pictorial foreground in the water squirting from the fire hydrant.
As I start to add details to layers such as the buildings, I make “sub-selections” again using the pen tool as detailed in Part 1. Many of these I DO save to channels so I can turn them on and off. I could continue to make layers, but the more layers you make, the more memory it requires, and the program can start to slow down. You can load selections and invert them for “positive and negative” masks, and combine them with other ones for various new masks.
As to the brushes I’ve used, I tend to keep things simple – I don’t use a large number of different brush categories in a single illustration – again, I think this can lead to disharmony and call too much attention to the method itself, rather than the subject at hand. I love texture, and as I’ve stated earlier, I think the way Painter uses the pressure sensitive paper textures is one of its very best features.
Much of this picture was painted with the basic Digital Airbrush, but I make one important modification – I make it paper texture-sensitive by changing its Method Subcategory from Soft Cover to Grainy Hard Cover in the Brush Controls>General palette. Now I can bring out the grain of the basic paper texture, which I’ve used here at 150% scale. I also used the Variable Splatter Airbrush variant for some larger “speckles” in the flames.
I continue working back to front, occasionally changing things as the picture develops (notice how I rethought the most distant buildings, simplifying them to make the hand stand out better). Next, I’ll show a couple of simple “tricks” I used to make the smoke coming out of the monster’s nostrils.
So here we go. I do hope someone finds this useful. All I ask is that you please don’t copy this tutorial verbatim and reproduce it elsewhere. I’m happy to share for free, but I wish to keep my copyright. I’ve also published a similar tutorial of a simpler image in Corel Painter Magazine, issue 8, called “An Introduction to Airbrushing” for those who might be interested.
I start by taking my scanned line drawing and copying it to its own new layer, which I make a GEL composite method layer. 
This makes it transparent, and I can turn it on and off as a guide as my image develops. I also leave the original red scan as the Canvas layer.
I do a lot of work in this style using the Pen Tool. 
Drawing vector-based shapes takes practice, but there’s no better way to digitally create precise paths than this. Painter’s Pen Tool works pretty much the same way Illustrator’s and Photoshop’s does, placing straight-line points and allowing you to pull “handles” that control the curves.
What I’m really doing is the equivalent of “frisket” cutting for traditional airbrushing. I design these illustrations to be broken into a series of major shapes that will each be on its own layer.
Here you see the completed “Shape” path (look carefully - you can give these strokes and fills, but mine is just a path indicated in light blue with red points drawn to define the edges of the back-most flame shape). You can of course re-arrange layers easily, but I try to work logically “back-to-front” as I go.
Here I’ve converted the shape path to a selection. You can do this with a button on the Property Bar while the Pen Tool is selected , or from the Shapes Menu anytime the shape is selected. Selections are masks that control where digital “paint” or effects can go. The active selection is a moving dashed line sometimes called “marching ants”.
Now I fill the active selection with a flat color. You can use the Paint Bucket tool or go to Effects>Fill on the menu bar. At this point you can save the selection to the Channels palette, which I sometimes do, but often I don’t bother if the selection is ultimately going to be it’s own layer. This is because you can control where pixels go on a layer by using Preserve Transparency on the Layers Palette.
Here you see the filled shape layer and the Gel layer with the line drawing turned on. As I cover the Canvas layer, I can still see where I am by turning this on anytime I want. This will not be a part of the finished image.
Here I repeat the process for the next major area of flames. I don’t worry about the edges in common with the first shape, because I can load the selection to intersect with the transparency from the first shape’s layer. This gives a perfectly aligned edge when I fill it (as the second shot shows). I also don’t worry about edges that I know will be covered up by succeeding layers.
Here I’ve added a third shape layer over the last two.
I continue along using this method to establish the major elements of the illustration on layers. This is also a good way to begin creating your color scheme. Here is the progress with and without the Gel layer on. At this stage I already have 8 or 9 layers. Once I have this basic image, I’ll begin to add the details. We’ll talk about this in the next installment.
I knew when I started that I’d have trouble finding the time to keep this up properly. The only really good blogs are regular ones. Still, I don’t think there’s much point to posting just for the sake of it. The only reason someone might want to read this is for some useful information. I’m on spring break from my teaching this week and no pending freelance deadlines, so I swore to myself I’d get something posted here in between doing my taxes and painting my bathroom!
I’d like to start by answering a question I’m frequently asked: Why do I use Painter instead of Photoshop for my illustration work?
The answers are:
A. – Painter is the first program I learned to use on a computer, so I have a long familiarity with it.
B. – I like the interface that comes from traditional artist’s materials rather than photography (as I do!).
C. – I prefer the brush customization interface, and the pressure-sensitive paper texture feature.
D. - I often like to use Painter’s vector Shapes feature or import vector art from Adobe Illustrator. I prefer the way Painter handles this to Photoshop.
I know that much of what you can do in Painter you can do in Photoshop, so to each their own, but for me it’s Painter.
I’m a “jack of all trades” kind of illustrator, but my favorite things to do are cartoony humorous illustrations. Like many a little boy, I loved drawing monsters and rocket ships and the like. Like many an illustrator, I’ve never quite grown up. So I still love these things.
Here is a piece that’s actually posted elsewhere on this site in the ADAPT Expo gallery. I did it for a proposed show a friend of mine was trying to get off the ground. Since it was not a “real” job, I took the time to document the creation for possible teaching use.
I’ll share it with you here over the next few days.
The way I’ve made this piece is basically my favorite way of working in Painter. It’s not for everybody, because it’s rather indirect, labor intensive, and creates large files.
The style is what I’ve come to call “rendered cartoon”. I’m not really a great natural draughtsman, really more a designer. I need to carefully shape and plan things. If I have any gift it might be for color and lighting. So I love to take the stylized world of the cartoon and shade it into a sense of rounded form. I’m highly influenced by animated cartoons and often imagine I’m creating my own little self-contained scene from one when I’m making a picture such as this.
All my work starts with traditional drawing – lots of struggle with thumbnail sketches to find what I’m after – I like to paraphrase the writer Dorothy Parker by saying “I don’t like drawing, I like having drawn”. I work hard to get all the things I want right in the line drawing stage. I just use lots of sketching and tracing paper and go through lots of revisions, finally making a careful drawing in hard red pencil on vellum paper. I use this kind of pencil because I like the way it feels better than graphite. None of this has much to do with being “digital”, although I do use the computer at this stage to find reference, and to re-size and distort parts of drawings on occasion. I scan the finished drawing into the computer.
Once I have this, the real fun for me begins, because while I mostly “think” my way to this point, I “feel” my way through the color and light. And even though my approach is pretty technical, I still find it intuitive. I really enjoy making the image “come to life” with color and texture. This is what I love about Painter.
Next I’ll start the step by step of how I do this style. Hopefully I’ll get these up in a regular fashion.