Starting with a sketch...
This tutorial shows how I might take a simple basic sketch a paint it. The sketch shown here was done on paper with pencil, but a digital sketch could be used also. While the sketch is not very clean, I have the mood of the character with a little shading, so I feel it's a good place to start.
All the painting done in this tutorial is using PhotoShop CS2 (but PhotoShop 7 or newer will work) and a wacom tablet. I'm assuming at this point you know where tools and settings are in PhotoShop. If you don't you can always use PhotoShop's help that comes with the program - it's pretty easy to follow.
A NOTE ON SIZE: I always paint larger then I plan to show the finished image. This is because I find it better to paint my details large and shrink them, rather than painting zoomed in. Shrinking for the finished version smoothes the image out etc. For this example I'm painting about three times larger than most samples seen here. If I were working for print medium I might paint even larger (such as 4000 pixels or higher) so I could do posters etc without losing image quality.
Dropping in a base tone...
The first thing I do is get rid of the white background my sketch has. Painting directly on white is never a good idea because the white of your computer screen is a "lit" white - it's whiter than the white of your paper and can throw your sense of color off.
First I promote the sketch to a layer and set it to multiply.
Next I go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation, check "Colorize" and adjust the settings so my sketch itself is now brown.
Next I create a new layer UNDER my sketch layer and fill it with a light brown.
Last I paint a little tone into my filled layer.
Note: Here I am painting with my standard paintbrush. My standard paintbrush is the "Airbrush Pen Opacity Flow that comes with PhotoShop, with the opacity set down to about 60%-70%, and the "hardness" between 60% and 100%.
More tone established...
Now I'm further trying to establish the tone. I'm painting right on top of my sketch in a new layer (with the same brush mentioned above). I paint lightly so as to blend my original sketch lines, but not cover them completely. I'm trying to find a mood at this point. I'm not too worried about color yet.
Starting on the face...
Now I go in and start adding a little more tone to the face (with my hardness set down on my brush). I also begin to paint in the markings. I paint very "organically" - meaning I work slowly and let the picture tell me what's "right" for it. My biggest concern is always to let the character's personality and mood show up.
I have also painted in the eye. For many of my fae paintings I like to use black eyes without a clear pupil. In this case the eye is just black, with a lighter highlight and a slight orange highlight to pop it out.
HOW I USE LAYERS: I don't use too many layers when I'm doing "organic" looking paintings. On this painting I pretty much did each step on a layer and then merged it down to my original layer before going on to the next step.
Texture in the skin..
One of the problems with digital painting is that it can look too smooth and polished. Some people like that look and that's fine. As I stated above I like my paintings to look organic, natural, and painted. Part of what does this is the fact that I never completely cover my initial sketch, so it still has a little of that "sketchy" feel.
The other part is what you see here - I don't paint completely with an airbrush. I use the same settings that the brush I mentioned above has, but I use a different brush shape. In this case it's a custom shape made of dots (shown in the corner of the image here). By using this brush set fairly small it allows me to create some texture in the skin. (See other tutorials on this site for how to create your own brush shapes - it's easy).
Painting the hair...
My secret to painting hair is using a custom brush shape - the same one I used above for the skin. The only difference is that I set the "spacing" on the brush VERY low. This allows you to paint strands of hair in groups. Here I blocked in the hair using a dark color with a light color over it.
Note: There are hair tutorials on this site with other ways of painting hair too.
Finishing up the hair...
Here I've finished up the hair by painting the background color back in to give the hair shape. I also blended it slightly with the smudge tool. I used the same brush shape with the smudge tool that I used for the hair. You'll notice I've also started playing with breaking the character out from the background. I like to do this with my paintings by adding a slightly lighter outline around some of the character (if you outline the whole thing it will look flat).
Painting in the body...
Here I've painted in the rest of his body quickly. I used the same techniques as for the face, including using the custom specked brush shape.
Adding color variation...
These two images show me adding color variation. I think it's important to use color variation in images to create depth and interest. This is especially true in skin - shadows are not always the same color darker. In the case of this painting the character is fae, so I could have fun with the colors:
First I added some green tones. I did this by creating a new layer and setting it's mode to "Color". Then I painted in the areas I wanted green using my standard brush. I then adjusted the opacity of the layer so the color wouldn't be too bright.
Next I added in the "glowing" orange tones you see here. I did this by creating a new layer and setting it to "Color Dodge". I then painted into that layer using orange/red tones and again adjusted the opacity down until it looked good.
Note using a LAYER set to "Color Dodge" works better than using the dodge tool because the layer can dodge in specific colors and you can adjust the layer opacity to make it subtle as shown here. Also note the "reflected" or "bounced" light I've used on the underside of his neck and chin. See the shading tutorials on this site to get a better understanding of shading and using reflected light.
Popping him out from the background...
Here I do more of what I was talking about earlier. I darken the background and then "pop" him out from it using a slight white outline just on one side of his face. You can get very different effects by using more blended outlines (like the way he looks in earlier examples) or by not using outlines at all so that he blends into the background naturally. I could also have used a specific color for the outline to create a different mood - such as an orange, red, or green color.
The finished image!
Below is the finished image. Please keep in mind (again) that the actual painting was done 3 times this size. You will notice I added a few more things to the finished painting:
I added a light scar line above his eye and darken the eye area so that it was closer to my original sketch.
I added in an earring (I painted this on a separate layer using colors already in the painting)
I added my signature of course!
This whole painting was done in about 35 minutes. If I were going to do a print of this I'd probably spend a little more time texturing the background and making the shading more dramatic. I could also (for example) give him a matching necklace to his earring... or I could add a bird sitting on his shoulder (which would be cool!). My point being that you can just keep working on an image with more layers and ideas until you feel it is done.
That's it folks! I hope you enjoyed this look at how I paint! Feel free to give me feedback so I can revise this tutorial or answer your questions in future tutorials.
