Although with practice, it is entirely efficient and possible to draw your subject matter straight into Photoshop with the tablet, I still find I prefer to hand-draw my line art. The flexibility of line and movement achievable by pencil is more natural even in a rough sketch. This particular line art is decently precise because it was initially meant for a coloring contest in an online forum, so it’s a little cleaner than I usually use.

Before you begin, it is best to have planned out a clear direction for your painting. This piece I wanted rather moody. She is a freelance cop of sorts, pinned down in a flooded basement behind a short wall. The main light sources are the flashlights bouncing off the back wall from her pursuers and a reflective light from the lower right of the painting. Keeping in mind the flashlights will be a warm gold and the reflective light will be a LCD-type teal, I begin to work out the subdued tones and light direction in my choices of color. Sometimes it is good to do a small draft painting, loose and rough, that has your lighting and color saturation issues figured out. Gathering references is a must as well, and I have collected water, gun and material photos as well as bribing a friend to model the pose for me. ;}

When using line art, a neat little trick is to copy it on its own layer and set the layer blending mode to ‘multiply.’ This essentially turns anything white invisible and leaves the other various shades of gray to shadow anything in layers below. If your sketch is particularly clean, this allows for coloring layers underneath so you may color your subject matter without augmenting the original sketch.

One of the best methods I’ve found — and certainly one of the quickest — is in blocking out general shades and lighting through swatches of color. Start with a medium-toned color and fill in the various shapes as if coloring a coloring book. This most basic step may seem rather cartoonish, but it is a very easy way to begin balancing your tones and hues to achieve the desired atmosphere. In particular, I see that Jhenna’s uniform top is far too dark for the background and this will change dramatically throughout the painting process. Luckily, one of the greatest features of Photoshop is its flexibility for tone and color. I will certainly make use of that.

Using the marquee tool and a good solid brush, I fill in the basic color areas. Each basic article such as the pants, the shoes, hair and gun is on its own layer. I use the marquee tool for the smaller areas (selecting the space and then filling with color), and the brush for the larger. This allows for varying degrees of control and blocking in color. Once each is on a layer all nice and crisp, I usually hit the preserve transparency button at the top of the layers pallet for each. Then I can do anything I want to the color without going out of the lines.

Following the lead of the face, I now take a medium-highlight color of my base colors and roughly pass an application of lighting. As you can see with the shirt, holsters and pants, I’ve begun to indicate the moody light brought on by the flashlights bouncing off the back wall. Don’t worry about being too exact at this stage. What you’re trying to achieve is more overall impression rather than realistic precision. If you can paint the general lay of light, you’re golden.

This may look like a large step, but it really isn’t. Using the same idea of blocking in rough passes of lighting, I’ve applied two layers of color: a light highlight and a dark shadow. The only difference here is instead of a hard-edged brush I used a fuzzy round brush to apply the tones.

Specifically, for the shadow streaks, I used a slightly more saturated form of the base color set to the ‘multiply’ brush blending mode. A trick here, depending on your comfort level, is to set the opacity of the brush to a lower level (say, about 25%) and gradually build up the darks. If you have a tablet, this step is much faster. Even at this stage, I will vary up the brush size and opacity levels. For example, to get a more subtle and gradual gradient, I used the “]” key on my keyboard to quickly increase the size of my fuzzy brush and lowered the opacity for the basic stroke. Then, to build up the tones more precise in the middle of the gradient, I decreased the brush size (“[“ decreases brush size) and raised the opacity. This allows for a very gentle application of tone while maintaining a lot more control over the strokes.

The same idea goes for the highlights. Using a slightly-desaturated lighter color of the base tone, I set a small fuzzy brush to ‘normal’ and applied very sparingly the lighter parts of my figure. It is important to note that it’s best to keep a tight reign on this level of highlight. Too much of these dabs of high contrast and the eye has no resting place on the painting. High contrast and high saturation are immediate ‘attention-getters’ for the viewer, so be sure to keep those features only where you want the main focus of your work. As you can see here, much of the attention is on her shoulder, face and gun arm. This will change somewhat with the addition of the reflective light, but overall, I want to keep a close handle on it. Light itself works as a gradient: it will be strongest at the center of the light source, radiate and fade the further from that source. When dealing with two or more light sources, you will still have one primary source and one secondary brightness. Even then, the light emitted will fade the farther from the light source. This is why it’s so very important to know just where your highlights will be and why they will not usually extend to all parts of the image.

Here is where some of the real handwork begins, as you can see in the face. You have laid out your general lighting and colors up until this point and now it’s time to begin blending the colors together and smoothing the features. For this, I used a fuzzy medium round brush in my smudge tool and set the pressure to roughly 65%. This offers some pixel-moving power without getting out of control. The key here is to take your time. The smudge tool is not an instant fix or filter, it requires patience and practice. Using my model reference, I begin smoothing out the different shades in the face. It is important to keep referring to your reference concerning proportion and anatomy. Also, don’t be afraid to fall back on your paintbrush for some touchups or tweaking of tones. I frequently utilized the brushes in completing her face and hair.

Notice that she no longer shows signs of the line art in her face. Once I got to a level of more precise detail with her features, the line art was no longer needed. There are many ways to get rid of the line art, whether erasing or merging, but in this particular case, I simply applied a mask to the layer and brushed out the pertinent lines through the mask. This way, if throughout my painting and smudging I may have lost some of the original character of my sketch, I can easily turn off the mask and see where I may have strayed.

Again, I did a lot of smudging here. And since the uniform shirt was on its own layer, it was relatively simple to change the color and tone. For the color, I hit Ctrl+U on my keyboard to bring up the Hue/Saturation window and fiddled around with the hue and saturation sliders until I came up with a nice sapphire blue. For the tones, hit Ctrl+L for the Levels window and increase the contrast by bringing the darks (leftmost carrot on the graph) right a bit and increasing the lights (rightmost carrot dragged to the left).

Still using the same smudging technique and some brushwork, I detailed the shoes and holster. It’s times like these that having boot reference is essential, whether photo or physical. The reference not only aides in realism but speeds up the painting process: it is much faster to see what you need to create rather than imagine it. This is not to downplay imagination and creativity in the least! Simply, if you’re painting shoes on an alien, spend creative time on the alien and get reference for the shoes. :} I happened to own an old pair similar to the ones Jhenna wears, so it was just a brief trip to the closet and the shoes took little time to do.

Secondly, to aid in the lighting layout, I quickly brushed in a shadow on the floor and wall behind. A very nice shortcut: put the shadow on its own ‘multiply’ layer. This allows for a great deal of flexibility from color to gradient to opacity. If you always keep directional shadows a separate entity, then changing it to suit the evolving background becomes much easier and saves a lot of potential hand-work!

A very handy shortcut concerning background textures is in the manipulation of flat layers through the transform tool. For this trick, open a new document roughly double the width of the pertinent area for texturing. I applied a medium gray to the base layer of this new document and began scratching some lighter shades of gray with texture brushes. Take your time, adding generalized details, taking care to avoid many unique shapes that may be an unwanted focal point. Don’t forget to use your clone tool and even copy and paste details to cover ground. You can always go in and augment some more variety by hand. (fig.8.1)

A key step in this texture is in making it tileable, or seamlessly repeatable on all four sides. Normally this could be a very daunting task, but fortunately Photoshop has just such a solution for your tiling needs. Go to filters>other>offset. A dialog window will appear requesting dimensions and edge options. (fig. 8.2) Type in half the measurement of your document: for example, if the document is 500 pixels by 1000 pixels, type in 250 x 500 and select wrap edges. This takes all the edges of your texture and moves them to the center. Essentially, the four corners of your painting move to the middle and the middle of your painting become the new corners. This is a very useful trick because now it enables you to take a clone tool or brush and rid yourself of the seams. Once they are removed and your texture flows continuously across your document, a quick Ctrl+F replicates the last-used filter (in this case, Offset) and you are back where you started from. This time, you have a seamlessly tileable texture good for any manner of duplication on your walls, floors, what have you. (fig. 8.3)

I had you create this document at roughly double the width of the space needed to provide enough extra play in positioning. To apply the texture to the back wall, copy and paste the texture into your painting at the bottom of the document. Since your line art layer shows the perspective lines of your wall, you have given guides to nudge your wall into place.

Selecting your texture layer, decrease the opacity sufficient enough to see the image below, type Ctrl+T (or effects>transform>free transform) and nodes will appear on the corners of your texture. While holding the Alt key, click on the nodes and drag them to the corners of your wall, taking care to allow for runoff of the wall off the document. To facilitate the alignment, I frequently like to zoom out of my document by pressing Ctrl+- so that I can see the nodes in the margins outside the painting. With a lot of nudging and tweaking, you can scale the texture so that it matches the perspective of the back wall. (fig. 8.4) Once you are satisfied with it’s placement, click enter and it will transform to the shape selected. Be careful to get this reasonably correct on your first try. If you press enter and try to transform again, the nodes will not appear on the corners of your texture but as a rectangular bounding box of the layer. If your initial attempt is close to what you wanted, however, you can tweak again slightly to achieve a more precise fit.

I did the same thing for the back wall, floor and ceiling. And it is the back wall which makes it worth taking that extra step to make the texture tileable. Before transforming the wall, I duplicated the flat texture into a new layer, duplicated the layer again by clicking the layer and dragging it to the page icon at the bottom of the layers pallet. I aligned this new texture to continue at the top of the old one, linked the layers and merged them. Now that I have a lot of texture to scale and work with, I transform and nudge to taste.

The blue of the uniform was just a little to cliché and prominent for my liking, so here I did a lot of experimentation to decide upon a color I liked. Knowing that the reflective secondary light source was to be a nice teal, the blue was definitely out along with yellows and reds due to personal preference. Olive green is a favorite color of mine, so a quick Ctrl+U and some fidgeting of the sliders resulted in a hue which complimented the skin tones, red hair and lighting choices a bit better.

I also finished up the pistol and shoulder holster using mostly a small, ‘normal’ slightly fuzzy brush. The pipes and vent in the background were brushwork as well.

Here is where reference pays off again. I found some scuba-diving photos that showed the water’s edge and tried to mimic its properties. For this, I found a couple techniques useful. This water was created in two main layers: the dark underwater layer and the brighter surface ripples. The bottom was the easiest to create and took little referencing.

I created a new layer, filled it with a muted medium blue for the underwater part and carved out the rough edge with my eraser. Once I had a shape I liked, I locked the layer by clicking on the preserve transparency box (the upper leftmost box in the layers pallet). After choosing a second lighter blue for the background color swatch, I applied filters>render>render clouds for the basic mottled texture. After applying the clouds, I swirled the texture by applying filters>render>ripple and selecting a large wave with a low frequency. If you apply the filter a few more times, you get a general wave-type texture that somewhat looks like water. In addition, a few swipes of the smudge tool here and there, set the layer to ‘multiply’ and it’s good to go.

The surface of the water took a lot more maneuvering. Concerning the properties of water, there are two main features: reflection and refraction. Reflection happens when the surface of the ripple is more parallel to the viewer’s point of view. This will show the images of Jhenna, the wall, the lighting and anything in the environment, but mostly a general ambient foggy coloring. The refraction is the surface of the ripple facing perpendicular to the plane of view, allowing access to the objects below the water’s surface.

In illustrating this, the largest amount of work was in regarding the reflective portions of the water. I used a small fuzzy brush set to 65% (and variances) and carefully stroked in the waves you see here with a muted steel gray. Occasionally I added some light teal highlights, but it was mostly a lot of hand painting and smudging while constantly referring to my reference.

For the refracted parts of the water, I used the familiar browns and grays to wriggle some movement into the underwater elements. This was on its own layer below the water so that I didn’t augment the original character.

For the background, I darkened the walls by using a dark brown gradient on a new layer set to ‘multiply’ and desaturated the walls using Ctrl+U so that the tones were not so harsh. I also softened the overall shape of the cover wall by erasing some erosion into it.

Believe it or not, this’s only two layers. Create a new layer and using various fuzzy brushes, at different opacities, gradually build up the reflective lights using a wonderful LCD-type bright green. This was applied to all of Jhenna, including her underwater parts, the back wall behind her and the water surface. The only deviation is I created another new layer set to ‘screen’ for the underwater floor and wall. The edges in the floor are nothing but a small brush squiggle with some gradual buildup of tones for the plate surfaces. Adding to this ‘screen’ layer a light radial gradient at low opacity using the gradient tool helped to flesh out the more intense light source of the right corner.

Using a small textured brush, I quickly scribbled out some algae on the wall and floating on the water’s surface. Locking the layer to preserve transparency, I then added lighter and darker tones to create more dimension and bounce the light sources off the algae. In particular, using a lime green with the brush mode set to ‘color dodge’ or ‘overlay’ are particularly useful for such an occasion. On another ‘overlay’ layer, I added some brown rust streaks behind the piping to age the place and give it a bit more ambience.

The flashlight effect was perhaps one of the easiest effects to create. Using your oval marquee tool, create a large horizontal oval and fill it with a pale lemon yellow. Reduce the opacity of the layer and use your transform tool (Ctrl+T) to skew the shape in to place, as you see for the largest oval of the back wall. While transforming, take care to add some perspective to the shape and really solidify it on the wall by widening the oval as it recedes from the light source. I set this layer to ‘soft light’ at 85% for blending mode.

Duplicate this layer and transform this new layer to a smaller oval, as you see for the medium ring on the wall. Double click on the layer. This will open up a very large and flexible layers pallet. It will default to the blending mode selection. Reduce the opacity of the blending layer to perhaps 20%. Add an outer glow (see left column of the pallet). Set the glow to a pale yellow, at a lower size (perhaps 3 or 5). Add an inner glow, but specifically set the inner glow to glow in the center rather than edges. Adjust the size of the glow to duplicate a warm radiation in the center of the oval and click ‘okay.’

Voila. You have a flashlight effect.

In final cleanup, I finished up the gloves, zippers and other details. And just for fun, I decided to add some location designations and humorous graffiti to the background. In this case, a parody of a friend’s poster and other scribbles.