Color Blending, FX Brushing and Photos for Texture

Hi Everyone,

For this week's blog I thought I would do a demo covering how to create light and shadow with color instead of just value and various texture techniques using Adobe Photoshop CS 5 and lower. In this demo you will see how to use the color blend mode for layers, how to use the FX options with your brush strokes and color blend mode, and how to use photos for texture using the color blend mode. These were techniques that I learned and adapted from my illustration professors Cliff Cramp and Christian Hill at Cal State Fullerton. I have broken up the tutorial into three sections because of duration limitations on You Tube. I would suggest viewing these demos at a high resolution so that you can properly see the settings. These demos only go over the very basics but they do give insight of how to approach digital painting.

Digital Freehand Inking With Adobe Illustrator

Being a good inker is a valuable skill as either a comic book artist, graphic designer or an illustrator. While traditional inking skills with brush and pen makes for a good solid foundation, having digital inking skills in today's day and age is a must. When it comes to digital inking, knowing how to handle the pen tool is a must and it was something I quickly had to learn during my internship at MGA Entertainment, however using the pen tool, while can give you a lot of control, also takes a lot of time and has it's own problems. The ability to ink fast is another skill that is a must in the art world, because let's face it, the faster you can do quality work the more money you can make. So in this video I am showing how to digitally ink using the blob tool which is more intuitive and has a more natural look. In this video I have used a Cthulhu sketch I did for T-shirt flair in my new clothing line I am calling Lovecraftian Flair.

Speed Painting Techniques Act 2

Continued from Speed-painting-techniques-act-1

As from the previous speed painting post I said that I was a bit rusty, but thanks to the daily speed paint challenges from da-speedpaint on Deviant Art I not only knocked that rust off, but I am now oiling the squeaky wheel!
One of the big mistakes I think I have done was to try and sketch out a speed painting. Sketching is not a bad thing for speed painting, but I have found that I would get caught up in the sketch, which in turn, would eat up time and then I would get trapped by the sketch. If you do feel the need to sketch then keep it loose and keep it fast and keep yourself unconcerned about detail because that is not what speed painting is about.

Another tip I found to help my speed painting is not be afraid of using loose references. Go ahead and do a fast google search for the topic you want to paint. Grab one or two of them and set them up on your screen next to your blank canvas. If you have a Poser you can set up quick poses and render them out as references as well. I found that it also makes it a bit easier to drop such references into a blank canvas that is the same dimensions as the one you are working on. By have loose references you free your mind up a bit so that you can just react and counter-react to how you are painting. When using references in speed painting it is wise to not and try and match the color of your reference because odds are you are going to make changes anyways, so close is good enough. 

Lastly when you start a speed painting, don't be afraid to be a bit sloppy while you block in your shapes. It is best to throw down as much of the color and general shape of what you are painting first. It is kind of like planning out a pallet and composition stage. Once you have everything laid out for positioning and color pallet you can then go to town and refine your painting for the rest of the time you have allotted yourself.

Check out more of my work at Tobias White Illustrations

You should also follow me on Facebook, linkedin, Deviant Art,  or catch me on Tweeter at @TobiasWhite1

Speed Painting Techniques Act 1

Part 2 continued from SpeedPaintingForProgression

A while back I had let my speed painting skills rust a little bit, so when I jumped back into speed painting I found my self struggling. However, I am getting back into the swing of things and so I thought I would talk about techniques I have been relearning and relearned.

 One of the techniques I have learned to improve speed painting is to use a variety of different brushes, brush size and opacity. If you have Photoshop C5 or higher than the pressure sensitive opacity toggle in your brush control bar is very useful for this. By doing this you keep your strokes from looking the same overall. This also helps you create detail with out getting nitty gritty which wastes time and our goal is to paint quickly
Another technique is one I learned from Cliff Cramp. By laying down local color first and then applying an overlay of color you can create shadow and light rapidly. This also will keep your work unified. In Corel Painter you would want to use digital water, but in photshop you do it with layers. One layer will be set to Soft Light or hard light (at 60% opacity) for my light sides and the other layer is set to Multiply (at 75% opacity). However, while this technique I was taught was generally taught for longer paintings I found it greatly speeds up a painting because it
takes out some of the thought process.

In combination with the overlaying techinque when you paint your local colors you will want to just block in the general shape of what you are painting. Think of the shapes as silhouettes. If you feel that you must sketch out the form from the inside then keep it as simple as possible and then block in a little bit with in that form. When you do the overlay technique over this you will get near instant volume to your painting.

Lastly keep in mind that this is a speed painting so set a timer of some sort: one that you can keep track of. When you are nearing the end of your time this is the time you use to clean up or to throw in those last needed details for your painting to be done.

Check out more of my work at Tobias White Illustrations

You should also follow me on Facebook, linkedin, Deviant Art,  or catch me on Tweeter at @TobiasWhite1