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In the last post, I talked about how I develop a line drawing for an illustration.  Now I'm going to walk through how I begin applying color.  What I am presenting in this post is just the first part of my painting process. Basically it's a quick color study. Everything I show below came together in about an hour.  In this first hour I try to establish the general colors and values of the painting. It's important to keep things loose and to think about the  image as a whole. I stay zoomed out for most of this process, occasionally squinting and stepping back from the monitor for a different view.

To begin I open a new PSD in photoshop with only two layers, the background layer and the line art layer.  Later I will expand to more layers, but for now I'm keeping it simple. The line layer is at 100% opacity initially. I also find that it's helpful to turn on preserve transparency for the lines so that I won't accidentally work on that layer. I always start off by filling my background with a color suited to the painting.  I use a darkish green here, because I want the atmosphere of a jungle environment.

Before I place any brush strokes, I decide the location of my light source.  I know that I want the girl to be the main focus, so I pick an angle for the sun that will best highlight her against the background. I grab a big round brush and set its opacity to something around 75% and start painting on the background layer.

I want the overall image to feel green, but I also want some color variation. I grab some different colors, blues, siennas, and yellows to add variety. I think about the mood of the environment while doing this. I imagine a bright warm sky with some light filtering down diffused from the trees and plants above. The atmosphere of the ruin would be darker and cooler, so I represent this using colors.

Now that the background is generally blocked in, I think about the figure.  She needs to really stand out from the back wall if I want her to be the focus of the image, so I pick out bright saturated colors for her.  I use an orange-red for her hair and shoes because it's a complimentary color to the green.

At this time, most of the big values are established, so I am able to lower the opacity on the lines. Having the lines faded back, allows me to see how the colors and values are holding up on their own. Without the stark lines, I notice the image needs some saturation and contrast.  I open up Hue/Saturation (ctrl u or cmd u) and push around the saturation slide until I'm fairly happy with it.  I know that I'm going to be upping the contrast next and that will saturate it some, so I'm sure to compensate for this now and hold back on my instincts a little bit.

Next I open levels (ctrl l or cmd l) and play around with the sliders to up the contrast.

The piece looks brighter now, but I want the blue to stand out at the bottom.  I could use the brush to work this up, but I want to demonstrate another technique I use frequently.  On a new layer above the background I use a gradient with my foreground color.  I only want the bottom half to have color, so I have transparency as my second color in the gradient.

I then lower the opacity on the gradient layer and grab a big soft eraser brush.  I set the eraser's opacity to something around 33%.  I can experiment and see what looks best erased out and softened.  This would also work with a layer mask. I merge this layer down once I'm satisfied with it.

The top of the image isn't looking as bright as I would like.  I could go in and repaint it, but it is faster to gently brush over it with the dodge tool.  The dodge tool can make colors look horrible pretty fast, so I only use it at a low exposure with one or two quick passes.  A big blurry brush will help to prevent the edges of the dodge showing up too much.

I'm pretty happy with the background adjustments at this point, but the figure is too subdued.  I really want her to stand out, so I grab some magenta, orange and yellow to give her more emphasis.  Once that's completed, I feel pretty satisfied with the general mood of the piece.  Now it's time to slow down and drag out my reference photos to start working in details.

I've been writing up a rather long blog post about my process with some screencaps, but I haven't quite polished it up yet. In the meantime, I thought I'd write about some of my favorite Photoshop brushes and share detail shots of my brushwork.  I've collected a small sample of my most used brushes and included them in an .abr file for anyone interested.  Some are standard Photoshop brushes and some are from other collections.  I wish I could remember exactly where I've gotten them all, but I have so many that it's difficult to keep track of where these specific 14 came from. 

By far, my most used brushes are hard rounds, like 1 and 2.  I start with them to block in color and I don't change to another brush until I'm nearing the stage where I need to add textures. Changing the opacity and color-picking constantly helps me get a lot of mileage out these brushes, especially in the first half of my painting process.

Soft rounds don't get nearly as much use from me. I like the textures that layering hard edges creates and I've found that if I use the soft brushes too often, my paintings start to look airbrushy.  However, big soft brushes are great for heightening washes of dark and light in large areas.  If I'm applying color in brush mode other than normal, I often use the soft brushes to keep the effects subtle as well.

4 is a new favorite of mine.  It has a nice toothy texture and works well to emulate pencil strokes.  It's also a nice alternative to hard rounds, when I want a less mechanic stroke.  The calligraphic angle helps add an extra variant to my strokes, so it works well with a lot of organic shapes.

6 is a rough round bristle brush which works great for smeary textured shapes.  It is my go-to cloud brush guy.  Upon discovering it, I found that painting clouds became about 10 times easier for me. This alone makes it one of my favorite brushes, but it is a great texture brush even without considering its awe-inspiring cloud powers.

7, 8, and 9 are a few of my favorites for texturing images. I have a ton of these kinds of brushes and they make up the bulk of my collection.  These three are some of the more commonly used ones.  I especially like 9 if I'm trying to make things look a little more painterly.

10 works great for wood boards, but I mostly use it for clothing.  When I cross hatch with this brush, it works well for creating a cloth texture and it's really good at building up believable form on fabric.

11 and 12 are hair and fur brushes.  I usually start with something like 11 to softly brush in the general forms of the hair and then I work details in with 12. 12 works great on a high-strength smudge brush when combing out hair as well.

I use 13 and 14 mostly as smudge tool brushes.  I don't use the tool a lot, but occasionally I need to soften up the edge of an object or blend skin tones.  13 works great around 5% strength in a small size for blurring effects.  I lightly smudge with the brush, by outlining around the form to soften edges. I find that it works better than using the blur tool, especially with really large canvases.    14 works best with a high strength (75%+) smudge.  It blends colors while adding texture.  It's tempting to take a shortcut and use it to blend everything, but overuse seems to muddy colors too much. 

I'm always trying to find new ways to improve my work flow, productivity and general "oh my goodness, this is so much fun that it shouldn't be called work"-ness in my daily routine. Two things I've discovered this past month, that have helped me in the art cave. 

The first discovery is Rescue Time.  It's a time management application that monitors all of the programs that I use and records the data.  It tracks how long I'm using programs or where I spend the most time on the internet.  I can group the programs into categories.  Photoshop, Painter, Thunderbird, etc get the very honorable "work" tag.  I then mark everything else as "recreational" or "waste of my very precious time". The application runs in my task bar and any time I would like, I can log in to the Rescue Time dashboard to see all the information condensed into bar graphs representing how I spent my time, daily, weekly, and monthly on the computer. It's like my own little supervisor man, with a no-nonsense expression, a white button-up collared shirt and a bad comb-over.  Perhaps he's glaring over a clip board with plentiful graphs showing how I spent entirely too much time reading RSS feeds this morning. 

If you're self-employed and work on the computer, I'm sure you can understand how useful this is. Firstly, it keeps me on a solid 40 hour week. Previously, I've been prone to workaholism because I would be unsure whether I put 40 hours in photoshop or if I had spent half of it emailing clients and marketing myself, so I'd usually do over-time on the weekends to err on the side of caution.  More importantly, I now have a very good idea how long it takes for me to create an illustration.  Knowing the actual hours spent on a piece is keeping me well informed and unbiased on how much to charge clients for the creating and revising process as well as communication.    Sure, I could keep my own hours just by watching the clock and rigidly enforcing my time on the computer, but Rescue Time makes it so much easier and takes into account all the nuances in my workday (coffee breaks ftw!). I'd seriously recommend it to anyone who is wanting to monitor and control their hours spent on the computer and who doesn't want to physically monitor it themselves.  It's been a huge help this past month with my time management.

The second improvement to my work flow this month is Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.  Oh how I wish I could write poetry because it deserves a beautiful sonnet.  I would compose in perfect rhyme about how lovely it accents my Cintiq and recognizes pen pressure with the ease of... something poetic.  I honestly don't know why I didn't try this program sooner.  I'm sure some of you are staring at me, thinking I must have been living in a rock cave with a chisel making my digital illustrations. Ok, so I should have tried it sooner, but I did try it last week.  This program's pencil tool responds so well to pen pressure and creates beautiful line widths.  I've seriously cut my sketching time in half, because I don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning up my line work.  Sure, I still go through a lot of layers until the drawing is properly refined, but it's that final line work that it has improved dramatically.  Since I've started using it, I've noticed that I'm sketching a lot more, which is always a good thing.  Below are some of the results of my feverish doodling with Sketchbook Pro.