Indiana Jones 5 Poster

It all Starts in Photoshop where I draw out a thumbnail and Start Comping in photos and painting in the gaps.   I explained the process in greater detail in my previous post, and it's pretty much the same here. I can leave it sloppy because I am going to Draw everything anyways. This was a Fun Part of the process because I got to cast my movie. My Idea involves Indy meeting up with an old buddy from WWII... Jacques Cousteau For an underwater archaeological adventure.

I prep my paper, In this case arches 160lb watercolour paper 22x30 Though I am going to upgrade to 300lb from now on... to Prep the board I paint it with Gesso Darkened to a medium grey. Starting with Grey leaves a lot more room to move in regards to the value range of the image. everything is medium until I eventually add the Highlights and the 3d forms pop out. I always wet the back of the paper first to avoid stretching and thus warping of the paper.

I project the image and Draw it in, constantly switching between the Projection and a Photo Printout to Place  everything. Then I erase it all away... almost.

Next I Draw It all in. this Time I used a really Dark Pencil 8B for the first time and It worked wonderfully to allow more of the drawing to show through the paint.
Then I Sprayed it With a Workable Fixative Spray, its the first time I tried this as well and it was a huge improvement, in regards to how the paint eventually sticks.

Next I painted in the blacks.

Then airbrush in the colors.

and Then Attack it with Pencil Crayons

Finally I get it Scanned and Photoshop it again to add a little contrast.
There you have it.

The 11 Doctors

Hi everyone, or no one? Here is a breakdown of my Picture of the 11 Doctors, which really is only a Thumbnail that I am using to plan out a much larger Acrylic Painting. I will project it onto a 22x32 piece of illustration board and Draw it out. So I left the photoshop work a little sloppy knowing that I am just going to be Drawing all the hands again anyways I didn't waste my time here. (arghh Hands!)

anyhoo here we go...

The whole thing springs from Bill and Ted (ironic?) I really love the Iconic hanging out moment and I wanted that with The Tardis so I took a screengrab.

Then I Traced out the position of the guys cause I like the energy and its a good starting point.

Next I Draw in the Tardis in a different perspective and distort my front guys into place. And then try to fit in all 11 of them This is where I made the decisions of composition like Tennant hanging on to the scarf and Smith at the top with the fez. Then I hunted for Images with that in mind.

Mainly I was looking for facial expressions, Tennant looking surprised, Smith holding the fez, Tom Baker, holding the hat with his scarf visible, and Eccleston with a big grin. The others were lucky finds and they ended up placing themselves in the image.

I grabbed a shot of the Time Vortex, I liked this one because of the Lightning bolt, I rotated it into a better composition and Painted in the missing parts.

I grabbed some shots of the Tardis and skewed it into place. The key is to do one side at a time and use the Transform>distort function to match the perspective I wanted, then I painted in the bottom.

At this point I crop out all of the reference pics and place them. Then paint in the arms and pieces to fill in the gaps. Each doctor is on its own layer and I work on a new layer then merge with the photo. Because I merge them down to individual layers I don't have the Process images to show what i've done but essentially I just clean up the edges and roughly paint in the missing anatomy to tie them all together.

Here it is at the end of my photoshop portion of the work, you can see I have extended the canvas to give it more room and rotated things around and changed the placement a bit. The advantage of having them on separate layers is I can endlessly nudge them around. I finished painting in Tennant and Mccoy and used the Transform>warp feature on their bodies to give that nice curve and motion, also because I suck at foreshortening. As always whenever you add or transform an element you have to go in and paint over it a bit to fix the wonkiness. And thats about it shake well and serve... Time to prep my board for drawing!

I start by painting my surface medium grey with Gesso this gives me a nice surface that acrylics stick to very well. The key is to wet the back of your board or paper first then Gesso the Front and leave it to dry. That way both sides dry at the same time and the board wont warp (much.)

Next I project my photoshop comp onto the board and pencil it in with a light pencil. It's usually hard to see so you keep checking back and forth with the projector and a printed photo to make sure you get the placement of the major forms. It's important to remember that you are making a 2d representation of 3d forms and should follow your gut as much as the reference. Just tracing a photo wont make the drawing work it'll look really stupid, you have to interpret what you see into shadow and light areas.

Next I erase everything until I can barely see it and Start Drawing with a darker pencil and looking closely at the photo for specific features that create the resemblance of your subject.

Next I did an Acrylic Wash over everything to set my Drawing in Place. MISTAKE!!!! It created blotchy areas that were a PITA for the rest of the process. Nowadays I spray my stuff down with a workable fixative, It works so much better.

Next I painted in my blacks

and then my colors, usually I leave color for the next part of the process but The specific costumes made me choose to lay some in ahead of time.

Next I lay in the colors and skin tones with an airbrush. Very lightly to preserve the drawing underneath.

Then the fun part I go back in with Prismacolor Pencil Crayons (colored pencils for you Yanks!) and I add in the bright highlights with white and move onto reestablishing the darks.

Then I went Back with The airbrush to add a little Volumetric lighting to the light sources and the Text.

Then again with pencil crayons to bring back anything I have lost.

Scan it and add a little photoshop Tweakery and we're done!

Some Face sketches

Just some practice doing faces...

WANDERER

Here are some Pages from a Graphic Novel I am working on called Wanderer. It was written by Myself and James Mackenzie, Drawn and painted by me.
They are all at various stages of completion, by no means finished. I have had this project on the shelf for a while and I am hoping that posting them and looking at them myself will give me a kick in the ass to finish.

A few were penciled and then Photoshopped and then I adopted the technique of painting the boards in acrylic. still a long way to go but here's where I am at

How to Colour key or make a matte in Photoshop

Hello people with nothing better to do than read the nonsense i write. First let me say I'm sorry. it's bad enough being so bored as to write it, let alone be the reader so GO seize the day or something... well if you are still here then you might as well learn something. so here goes...

one of the mistakes most newbies to photoshop make is when separating objects from a background, they grab the eraser and start going to town or maybe the magic wand or quick mask. and the result is it takes waaayy too long and usually looks like garbage. No worries EVERYONE did the same thing. up to and including John Knoll the Genius who invented the program.

So here's how to do it quickly and efficiently, based on an age old vfx secret the Colour (I spell it that way cause i'm Canadian, stupid spell check...) key.

so to start I grabbed a random image off google of a tree against sky. these techniques apply to any FG BG separation but since a tree is the most complex and impossible to paint out by hand or magic wand, i will use it for my example.

here's my image.

First you want to go to the channels tab in your layers pallete. Then click on each and decide which has the best contrast between what you want separated and the BG.

obviously it's the blue one in this case cause we want to remove the sky. so right click on it and duplicate it.

next click on your copy and make sure it's the only one visible. this is where we are going to make a Black and white Matte\alpha channel to do the work for us. so use a Curves adjustment or levels (image-adjust-)
and bring the white and blacks in to up the contrast. REMEMBER all we are worried about is the edges against the sky, we can fix the rest later. so try and get the sky white and the leaves black. but dont go so far that you are losing detail. when you play with it you will know the line...

at this point I sometimes repeat the last step to get closer to black and white. Again pay close attention to those leaves and don't go too far, you will see the edges getting nasty if you push the Blacks too far. its okay to leave them a little gray if you have to.

now i go in with  the lasso tool and fill in Large areas and  grab the Burn tool set to shadows to darken down the edges and details in the trunk. when set to shadows the burn tool wont affect the white so its pretty easy to get all the little spots.

Now you can CTRL Click the channel you just made, that will select everything white. CTRL-SHIFT-I will invert your selection to the tree instead of the BG. Click the RGB channel again to return to normal and go back to your layers.

Now you can copy it, in this case I just copied to a new layer.

usually ill hit it with a Layer-Matting-Defringe to fix the edges a little more. Et Voila way easier than trying to erase between leaves. just make sure that whatever BG your putting it on  is similar in value to the object if its too dark your edges will be to bright and it will look terrible. at that point you colour correct both the BG and FG elements seperately to get them close too each other, and then Colour correct them together to get it where you want it.

Learn this trick and it will help immensely there is a million uses.

Good Luck, PhotoChoppers!

Nick

Sketches, Speedpaints and other Digital Crappola

From the depths of obsurity I rise to lesser obscurity with this large art dump

...bong