Process

Process of one of my pieces

Hello guys,

Today I am going to show you my process of the Clumsy Mushroom where I use both traditional and digital media to create it which you will see below.

First of all, I started with sketching the mushroom in different poses and views with a pencil and paper which is considered traditional media.

After that, I moved the picture of the sketch to Photoshop in order to do the line-work for it by just dragging the file to Photoshop.

Then, I used the paint bucket tool to create a grey background instead of leaving the background white since in my opinion the grey will mix with my colour pallet better. You can see the paint bucket logo in the second picture.

Here, I did the line-work for all the mushrooms on one layer by drawing on the lines of the sketch to be more accurate and have cleaner line-work.

Then, I made the picture of the sketch unseen to start with the colouring and to make sure that the line-work looks clean and presentable.

In order to colour comfortably without taking care of colouring over the lines, I moved the line-work layer to the top layer.

I started adding colour to it (Solid colours) since these colours are the base colours of my creature.  I made the solid colours all on one layer which was a bad idea since it allowed more mistakes to happen. To paint the solid colours I used the normal brush in Photoshop.

Here, I did a new layer for smudging the colours together by using both the normal brush and the mixer brush shown in the second picture to make the mushroom pop out more and make it look more 3D by adding shadows. 

After that, I played with the Image Adjustments settings in order to make the tree lighter since it was too dark and the shadows were not seen which made the painting look bad.  

Here is an example of how I used the mixer brush which was by colouring to solid colours (one lighter colour and the other is darker for the shading).  First I used the normal brush to colour the solid colours, then I mixed them together and this was the result.

Then, I added more shading on the mushroom using a normal brush by just making the size of the brush slightly bigger.

I added highlights on some places such as: the head of the mushroom and the tree.  I chose for the tree a different highlight colour since I thought that white will not work with it.

I added a colour pallet to show the viewer the main colours of the mushroom and I finished the art piece.

Doing some things differently

On some pieces of my work like the Tree Monster, I have used a different shading technique and a softer brush as seen in the first picture to shade the example of the head and leg of the creature above.  

Then after I shaded it with a slightly larger and softer brush, I multiplied the layer which gave it a shading feeling to it.  I found this method to be easier than what I had to do with the mushroom since It took less time to make although I still prefer to make my pieces as how I made my mushroom.