The Professional Photoshop Book - Volume 7 2015

QUICK TIP: ROTATE YOUR CANVAS

To tackle complex shapes and get a new view of

your painting it is necessary to keep rotating your

canvas. It’s useful for finding mistakes to see

your work from another angle. The new angle

04

CHOOSE THE RIGHT COLOURS

To choose the colours for your painting, always

think what you want from your character; where the

person is at that time, where they belong, what time of

the day you want to show, and how much light exposure

you want in your character. Here we take very warm

colours for the skin and hair. Choose the highlight colour

according to you source light’s colour. Do not choose a

colour that is either too saturated or too grey; try to find

middle-value colours to start the painting.

05

CONSIDER SHADOWS AND HIGHLIGHTS

Let’s think about where the light is coming

from, because it will guide us to place shadows and

highlights correctly. Always remember that the light is

the soul of any painting; no matter how much you work

hard with colour and shapes, if your lighting is wrong

your painting is dead. In our painting the light is coming

from the top left and the exposure is high, so the cast

shadow would be very sharp. This effect is known as

high key in photography, or chiaroscuro in painting.

06

ST ART BLOCKING IN

So from here the fun part begins: colouring!

So to start the painting, we will add the midtone

colours with the brush on FileSilo named Blocking

brush. The brush size should be over 100px with the

Opacity and Flow set at 100%. It’s good to choose a

hard brush with some texture. Do not start the

painting with a round soft brush because it makes

07

BLOCK IN HAIR

As we have blocked in the face, we will

block in the hair too. But to paint the hair more easily

divide the hair into sections and choose the light and

dark colours according to the light. Here we will use

the brush named Hair Blocking at 70px in size with

Opacity at 80% and Flow at 60%. After that choose

the brush named Hair Blocking Two and lower the

Opacity to 60% with Pressure Sensitivity set to On.

This brush has texture and shape in it, so it will add

more volume to the hair shape.

08

ADD HER EYES

Eyes are the most important feature of

the face; they speak about the character’s

feelings and much more. To start painting the

eyes, take the brush named Skin and lower its

Opacity to 70-80%, open the Color Picker and

select a very pale light blue-grey colour (If your

character is considerably older than this one,

the painting look sloppy. Do not add very dark or

light colours at this stage. Take two shades of light

and dark from your midtones, and block in the

colour according to the light direction. It can be

helpful to set up a lamp that replicates the light

direction you want, and observe how the lighting

behaves on objects beneath it.

choose a yellow-grey instead). Outline the lower

and bottom eyelid with a dark blue-brown colour,

at the corners add a little reddish tone to it. For

painting the iris choose a dark green colour and

for the pupil choose a dark green-blue colour (You

can vary these colours depending on your portrait).

Last, add a highlight dot.

will detach you slightly from the piece, for a fresh

persepective. You can do this by using the Rotation

tool (R) or just flipping the canvas horizontally or

vertically using the Image>Image rotation option.

Digital painting

112 The Professional Photoshop Book

110-115 Digital Portrait Painting Tutorial.indd 112 06/10/2015 15:36