Beer Label Brainstorming pt2
30/September/2008
The answer to the Great Question of... Life, the Universe and Everything... is forty-two.
Douglas Adams from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
With the sketch of the Pan/fawn and bee characters from the previous post finalized, I’ve scanned the drawing and opened it in Photoshop. I’ve rotated the pencil a few degrees to the right to exaggerate the characters motion.
The drawing is bumped up to its own layer and the base layer is filled with the tan color because I like to work on a neutral ground. I saved the file and opened it in Painter and began to add color on another layer between the two. Painter’s brushes are great for building texture on underlying layers.
I now add a layer with a green fill and an oval cut out shape. The oval area will contain the distant background elements which I begin to rough in. The thatched roof cottage fits in to a fairy tale/medieval kind of setting, the flowers of course, spring. My original intent was to create a cutout with more of an amorphous shape but I like the way the oval frames the two figures and emphasizes vertical movement. With the lay in complete the rest of the painting process is one of refining, building form and value. I then save the file and reopen it in Photoshop. Most all of the work done from this point on is done with one brush, a Scatter Brush variant of my own making. The brush is very simply a stock Scatter Brush with Shape Dynamics enabled in the Photoshop Brush Engine so that I can paint a relatively thin to thick line based on brush pressure. While the brush doesn’t have the same naturalistic qualities as the brushes in Painter I do find it easier to maintain fine control with. (I often use another variation of the same brush but one with Texture enabled to break the stroke up and create more interest.)
The painting is essentially finished in this shot, (the background scene layer is turned off here),but I decide that the horns on the fawn are not working as well as I had thought originally so I paint them out on a separate layer. Much better and a lot less distracting. The solid green area looks too lifeless though so I decided to add a texture with a floral feel, something that would reinforce the flowers in the painting. Textures were imported and then smeared with Photoshop’s Smudge Tool using a rough edged brush. I’ve added a ring shape as well with a tortoise shell style finish to act as a border around the oval.
The completed painting below. (Click the image for a detail view.)
Douglas Adams from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
With the sketch of the Pan/fawn and bee characters from the previous post finalized, I’ve scanned the drawing and opened it in Photoshop. I’ve rotated the pencil a few degrees to the right to exaggerate the characters motion.
The drawing is bumped up to its own layer and the base layer is filled with the tan color because I like to work on a neutral ground. I saved the file and opened it in Painter and began to add color on another layer between the two. Painter’s brushes are great for building texture on underlying layers.
I now add a layer with a green fill and an oval cut out shape. The oval area will contain the distant background elements which I begin to rough in. The thatched roof cottage fits in to a fairy tale/medieval kind of setting, the flowers of course, spring. My original intent was to create a cutout with more of an amorphous shape but I like the way the oval frames the two figures and emphasizes vertical movement. With the lay in complete the rest of the painting process is one of refining, building form and value. I then save the file and reopen it in Photoshop. Most all of the work done from this point on is done with one brush, a Scatter Brush variant of my own making. The brush is very simply a stock Scatter Brush with Shape Dynamics enabled in the Photoshop Brush Engine so that I can paint a relatively thin to thick line based on brush pressure. While the brush doesn’t have the same naturalistic qualities as the brushes in Painter I do find it easier to maintain fine control with. (I often use another variation of the same brush but one with Texture enabled to break the stroke up and create more interest.)
The painting is essentially finished in this shot, (the background scene layer is turned off here),but I decide that the horns on the fawn are not working as well as I had thought originally so I paint them out on a separate layer. Much better and a lot less distracting. The solid green area looks too lifeless though so I decided to add a texture with a floral feel, something that would reinforce the flowers in the painting. Textures were imported and then smeared with Photoshop’s Smudge Tool using a rough edged brush. I’ve added a ring shape as well with a tortoise shell style finish to act as a border around the oval.
The completed painting below. (Click the image for a detail view.)
