Rendered Cartoon Illustration Technique Part 3
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.