More learning. I forgot that I came up with a kind of down and dirty process for PS painting a couple of years ago when I was trying to replicate the background style of old HB cartoons. Remembering that today, I put it into practice with the image above. With the prep done, that mouse head took me about 50 minutes to throw together. While I haven't done any extra layers for contrast or to throw contrasting colors into shadows to deepen them, I think it came out well enough. What I did to make this is to take a pencil sketch, bring it into Illustrator and define each separate element with a different colored shape. Then I export each shape onto its own layer in PS so I can select that shape and use it as a mask for the layer I'm actually painting in. Don't know if that makes sense but this is what the Illustrator image looks like that I make my selections from:
I choose wild colors so it's easy to tell what each shape is. Obviously they have nothing to do with the final color choices. Once I've painted an area, I turn off the selection/mask and work on the edges, softening them a bit to keep things from being too sharp. That make any sense? It certainly makes things faster for me.
More learning. I forgot that I came up with a kind of down and dirty process for PS painting a couple of years ago when I was trying to replicate the background style of old HB cartoons. Remembering that today, I put it into practice with the image above. With the prep done, that mouse head took me about 50 minutes to throw together. While I haven't done any extra layers for contrast or to throw contrasting colors into shadows to deepen them, I think it came out well enough. What I did to make this is to take a pencil sketch, bring it into Illustrator and define each separate element with a different colored shape. Then I export each shape onto its own layer in PS so I can select that shape and use it as a mask for the layer I'm actually painting in. Don't know if that makes sense but this is what the Illustrator image looks like that I make my selections from: 
I choose wild colors so it's easy to tell what each shape is. Obviously they have nothing to do with the final color choices. Once I've painted an area, I turn off the selection/mask and work on the edges, softening them a bit to keep things from being too sharp. That make any sense? It certainly makes things faster for me.
2 comments:
that's interesting… I usually for from a sketch to painting in a solid colour layer for each part in white or a base grey colour and then working on each part that way. You way seems more precise.
I based mine on the idea of making friskets and doing sponge painting. I probably don't need to take the extra steps of making layers for each shape; I can probably just use the one drawing and select each color at a time to paint this way. With the sponge painting thing, I needed the background to show through. Here, I don't.
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