Saturday Process: The monster lady

Today's process post is by Monkey, who will take you through a coloring of a illustration of some monster lady (who is holding a fish).

Hi everyone! So today I decided to work a bit more details than I usually do in terms of my pencils/linework. I started out in my sketchbook with a HB pencil, and roughed out this drawing. I then had Eve add something, and she chose to just add a little fish. Honestly, I was hoping she would do an environment for the character (since she's amazing and I'm not as experienced as she is), but I got a cute fish, so I'll take it.
After scanning the pencil drawing in, I then proceeded to multiple the drawing layer, and create a new painting layer underneath. I then started in blocking in color, not worrying too much about light and darks (as I took care of the basic lighting via pencil), and more about overall color harmony. Everything is a bit pastel-like at this stage, as I don't want to get too saturated yet, and since I'm dealing with a triad (yellow hair, blue jeans, pinky (ie red) skin and lips), I have to be careful not to make it clash too much.
Next, I throw in a gray gradient to give it a sense of a light source, which has to match with the light source that I first indicated by the shading of the character. I also decide to give her green eyes and blood-soaked red lips.

I want to give the illustration a bit of a mood, so I decide that the values are all waaaay too high key (ie. all the values are really light) and thus I play around with contrast, brightness, and levels to bring it down quite a bit. I add some blood splatters to her shirt, fish, and teeth.



Next, unfortunately, comes the "and then you suddenly have a cake" part, as I got a bit carried away fixing things and I forgot to take more intermediate steps of the painting. At this point, I realized that with the way I lighted the monster's body, her shadow should have been going behind her, not in front of her. Thus, I had to correct that, make a lot of the values darker, I threw in some wood textures behind her for a background, created a plane change where the wall hits the ground, added an overhead lamppost (outside of the picture plane), and hid more of her body in shadow.


So there you are, from pencil sketch to sort of a finish. In reality, I need to either move the light source over (to justify why so much of her face is lit up), or make more of her face and body darker. Also, the value change from light to shadow on her feet, leg, and arms could be made more apparent in order to really put the rest of her body in the shadows. Well, an artist's job is never really done - generally you just run out of time, motivation, energy, inspiration, or money, and that's when you call it a day.

Hope this was helpful and interesting, and thanks for reading!

Process: Locking transparent pixels

This week Monkey shares how to lock transparent pixels in Photoshop to make coloring things easier.

Okay, so recently I found out about locking transparent pixels, a feature in photoshop that allows you to change the color of your linework very easily.

So the screencap below is some calligraphy-ish type lettering I did for my friends' wedding invitations that I'm working on. However, they're not too keen on just black lettering, as it doesn't go with the rest of the color scheme, so I needed to change the color. Rather than go and repaint the lettering with a new color (and what if the color wasn't right?), I decided to try out this new (at least to me, PS noob) feature.

So as you can see (if you click on the image to see a larger version), I've circled the toggle button for the "lock transparent pixels" feature. Basically, what you are doing is that for whatever layer you are editing, you are making it so you can only edit the pixels that already have information in them. You can now no longer paint where it's transparent (until you unlock the transparent pixels). This lets you freely color in the pixels that have information (ie. your line work).

You can see in the above screencap that I'm now just using the brush tool to quickly swipe in color..I'm replacing the black with red.

Other applications for this would be when you are digitally painting and you are working in many layers. Say you are painting someone's face on a single layer. You've got the proportions down and you want to quickly replace some color on the edge of the face. Instead of carefully filling in color over your painting, if the background is transparent then you can lock the transparent pixels and then just paint away!

Anyhoo, I hope this helps a bit (it's really useful for logos!) and feel free to leave questions/comments/clarifications in the comments! Thanks for stopping by!

Reminder + Process: Coloring in Photoshop

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First off, as a reminder, our very talented Seal has been invited to showcase her artwork at the Saida Glide fundraiser event tonight at Sugar Cafe (679 Sutter St. at Taylor) in San Francisco. There is a fashion show at 9:30, but the event goes from 7pm til 2am. We'll be there from 7 til at least 11pm, networking, trying to sell our art, drinking, and doing some drawing.


Seal will be selling some fine art archival prints (giclees) for $25 of two of her newest work , as well as the original painting for the swamp house for $325 (or for $375 framed). Monkey might also go guerrilla-style (or is it gorilla style?) and sell some small prints and stuff for kicks (he'll have to wait and see how things are there).

Hopefully you'll stop on by and say hi!

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So today's Saturday process post is by Monkey. He'll be briefly explaining the basics of coloring in photoshop.

Hi everyone! So today I'll be explaining a bit how to do color a scanned line drawing in Adobe Photoshop. Examples of work I've done (and stuff that is suited for this sort of digital painting are things like:
and Notice both are really graphic with mainly solid linework and flat color mixed in. The way one does this is you start with a line drawing (I tend to do mine in a sketchbook or on paper as I don't really like to draw digitally if I can help it) that you scan in. After you scan it in, I usually clean up the half-erased marks and play with the levels to get my lines darker.

Here's my cleaned-up line drawing for the Handmade Ho Down poster and flyer.

You can see in the scan above that I actually didn't draw the flag logo yet...the logo was created the same way as I did the poster/flyer, but since it was already done I didn't want to redraw it, I left the top of the big flagpole off (I inserted it later digitally). Sometimes this is good if you already have an image that you're planning to work in - for me, leaving spots obviously blank is a good reminder that something needs to go there.

So here's where you start setting up PS to make coloring easier. Assuming all your lines are connected perfectly in your scanned drawing, you could just use the color bucket to paint large flat areas in your drawing. However, if you zoom in, you'll see that it'll eat into some of your linework, leaving it jagged at times. Thus, this is my preferred method. It's not quite as quick, but you'll get smoother lines.

What you do is first, right-click (or ctrl-click for mac mouse users) on the background layer (which should have your image in it if you opened it up in photoshop to start painting). Click on the "duplicate layer" and create a "background copy." Then, drag it on top of your background layer. Now, select your background layer and create a new layer between them. Select the background copy. In the photo below, it's labeled "Layer 1." Go to the little drop-down menu above the layers palette and change the layer property from "normal" to "multiply."
What multiply does is literally multiply the colors from that layer with the colors on the layer below it. Thus, any white space on your background copy will show pure color beneath it. Any blacks will show black. This allows you to paint on the sandwiched layer without affecting your original drawing. The only drawback to this is that you can't really use your paint bucket since this layer that you are coloring in is just an empty layer. However, like I said, it preserves your line quality, so it's almost like a coloring book where the black lines always stay on top of your coloring.

You could just create a multiply layer underneath the background layer, but I like to have a copy of the original drawing in case I need to make changes. This way, I can edit the drawing on my copied layer, and if I don't like it, I can always go back to my original background layer, make a new copy, and start from the original drawing.

In the screencap below, you can see which layer I'm painting on. Also, I felt it was prudent to point out the brush setting I use. Since I paint with a tablet (to be honest, I don't know how you can do digital art with a mouse), I have shape dynamics on, with size jitter at 0% and it being controlled by pen pressure. This way, the harder I press the fatter the line (to the max pixel size that my brush is set to), and the lighter I press the finer the line. This replicates brush control in real life - if you want to make a thinner line, you just use the tip of the brush. I also have the minimum diameter set to 0 so that I can use very very faint brushstrokes to make tiny, thin lines.
Also, note that I'm currently painting in RGB mode. This is great if you never plan to print out your illustration, but if you want to print it, BEFORE you start, change the mode to CMYK. Believe me, it'll make everyone happier.


So, after a lot of coloring and adding text and resizing things and moving things around, the little octopus guy turned out like this:
I ended up painting in the flag for the big logo, and replaced the hand-drawn SF Etsy flag with the actual logo. I also extended the pole and added the Etsy logo.

Anyway, that's it for now, and if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments and we'll get to them as soon as we can. Also, don't forget to show up to the Handmade Ho Down on December 3rd to meet us in person, check out our art, and see the grand premier of Monkey's new silkscreened ties! Thanks for reading!