Monthly Archives: July 2011

> Click Here to download the Brushes used in this tutorial.

1. Find your source / photo, open in photoshop!

2. Use Brightness / Contrast to alter the image to how you want it.

3. Sharpen with unsharp mask to make it as crisp as possible.

4. Feather off the edges to pure white; pure white is ignored by the brush system, so you will need to make sure there is no pale grey, or use an airbrush with pure white around your brush so that you do not get a grey box effect (yuk!).

5. Select box and highlight the part of the image you want for your brush, then click Edit – Define Brush Preset.

6. Open brush selector and select your brush (last one on the list), then open the Brushes Palette.

7.  In the Brushes Palette, click and toggle / play with every single option to learn how they work, decide what sort of brush you want to create, and make it!

 

Starting an image

3. Add a new multiply layer, and with this sketch your idea, if you haven’t had your Berocca today and need inspiration, hit the net (not literally) for reference pictures or art which tickles you (once again not literally).

4. Once you have a sketch down which your happy with (I went for a huge dragon, though more based on a lizard from some nature photos) add a Normal layer under the multiply layer and on here, get some tone down, paint away the basic shapes of the image… All the first steps I would recommend looking more at the thumbnail window than your main one, as you can get a better sense of where the composition is going.

5a. After this phase, use a combination of Overlay and Multiply layers to help you pull your image in to shape, and also to help you find a working colour palette.  I used an Overlay layer first, as I wanted the dragon to be epic and gigantic, I went for a bit of a limited dusk colour palette.

5b. Using a multiply layer next, just to drop in some shadows and again try to shape the images composition.

Here is a screenshot of the layers -
(Note; I’ve put these in a folder of their own as the rendering process often takes many layers.)

Rough painting – I’ve started to paint on top of my other layers now with a Normal layer, I do this until the image looks right when zoomed out / defocussed eyes.