Stage One - Drawing in Adobe Illustrator
First rough sketch in Illustrator, using Brush tool and Wacom tablet.
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(For complicated subjects I'd do another "pencil" stage in mid-grey, but I was happy enough with this drawing to go straight to "inks."
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I then used File: Export to export the finished drawing as a 400dpi RGB Photoshop document with layers (no anti-aliasing)
Stage Two - Preparation in Photoshop
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I added a light brown background to serve as "underpainting" for the eventual colouring. I usually work from a coloured background rather than white.
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Now to add the texture.
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I wanted the figure to be covered in spattered grime and blood (nice me). Photoshop and Painter aren't terribly good at generating big, coarse textures like that, so the easiest thing to do is to use a captured texture.
In this case, I used a digital photograph of the foam from a cappucino (top). I increased the contrast (below) to make the image more graphic, matching the style of the drawing.
I hid the line-work layer and pasted the texture into the drawing, under the white mask. The texture was black on an opaque white layer, and I wanted it to be in colour on a transparent layer, so I turned this image into a mask by going to the Channels palette and duplicating one of the channels (since the information is black & white, any of the three channels will do.)
In this case, I used a digital photograph of the foam from a cappucino (top). I increased the contrast (below) to make the image more graphic, matching the style of the drawing.
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Stage Three: Colouring in Painter
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Opening the file in Painter, I locked transparency on the layer containing the texture and painted into it with browns and greens, so that it looks like mud is mixing in on the legs and feet. Locking transparency (in Photoshop and Painter) means you can only paint or fill on parts of the layer that already contain pixels; or more simply, it stops you "colouring outside the lines")
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Finally, I added a few highlights to add that bit of extra "pop."
The final step was to go back to Photoshop, adjust the colour a little using Hue/Saturation, and then resize to 800 x 532 pixels @ 72dpi using Image: Image Size and then Save For Web... as an optimized JPEG.
The final step was to go back to Photoshop, adjust the colour a little using Hue/Saturation, and then resize to 800 x 532 pixels @ 72dpi using Image: Image Size and then Save For Web... as an optimized JPEG.
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