Photoshop Frustration!

I must admit, I'm still pretty leery of digital artwork. Up to this point, all of my artwork generated on the Mac has been of the hybrid sort: drawn and inked traditionally by hand, then scanned in and coloured up with Photoshop. Notice I said "coloured" as opposed to "painted". You see, I don't consider what I've achieved thus far to be digital paintings - at least not in the truest sense.

Here's a recent example which explains why not. This actually just started out as a test to see if I could create something using the Paths function on Photoshop. Frankly, I've never been able to figure out how to use that nefarious Pen tool, with it's Bezier Curves function. Being a right-brained kind of guy, I just couldn't make sense of those weird little handles. However, one of my students this year at Sheridan, Lawrence Lam, was kind enough to give me a basic tutorial on the different aspects of the Pen tool. I hadn't been practicing since then (about March), so it took a lot of messing around with it a couple days ago to figure it all out again. Fact is, it took me several hours to achieve what l did, so I'm going to have to work with this a lot more to get up to speed!


First of all, I needed some subject matter to practice on. Let's see now, what should I draw? Hmmm...hey, how about a CUTE GIRL! Fortunately, I'd been downloading pics of The Toronto Sun's daily "Sunshine Girl" for just such an occasion, so I had quite a collection to draw from. Though these pics are all relatively small, I wasn't in great need of visual clarity, as I am not attempting to achieve a perfect caricatured likeness of a specific girl. Anyway, I liked the sunny look of this cute blonde with her ponytails, plus the pose was appealing, so I went with her.


So here is my pencil sketch, starting out with a rough blue underdrawing, then defined on top with a dark pencil outline. (Are you paying attention, Sheridan students?) Like I said, I'm not trying to get a true likeness of this girl like I would with my celebrity caricatures - I'm just trying to capture her essence and using her pose and facial type as a starting point for what will be a much more cartooned interpretation. You can see how I've pushed the pose more, exaggerating the tilts and angles. For some reason, I have no idea why, I just gave her a single ponytail in the back instead of the two that the model has. Anyway, I only spent less than 20 minutes on the drawing, as it really was just for the purpose of this test with the Paths tool.


So after creating individual Paths for her flesh, hair, skirt, top, lips, eyes, etc. etc., I was finally ready to start adding colour. Initially I just filled each area with flat colours using the Paint Bucket tool, then started some fairly simple rendering in each area. I did want to try to get away from just using the Airbrush tool, so I used a custom brush that I learned how to make from an online tutorial that gave a more textured sort of rendering, similar to pastel. That, plus some softening here and there with the Airbrush seemed to result in a piece that was fairly appealing. I kept my pencil sketch on a transparent layer on top, lowering the opacity of the linework so it didn't overpower the colour. However, here's where I feel rather handicapped by my minimal knowledge of Photoshop and digital painting.


Here is the same artwork with the pencil sketch layer turned off so that just the colour is visible. As you can well see, it doesn't work like this, as it needs the pencil line to pull it all together. Ideally though, I would like to develop my Photoshop skills enough to attempt a real digital painting, using just tonal rendering to create the form, though perhaps using a bit of accent linework to strengthen it here and there. Recently, I've joined the National Caricaturist's Network (NCN), and have been studying the wonderful work of such talented folks as Joe Bluhm, Court Jones and Paul Moyse, just to mention a few. All of these guys are exceptional talents working with both digital and traditional media, but it's their digital work that I'm really trying to learn from. These guys are truly digital "painters" in the very real sense - something that I currently can only aspire to. If anyone can recommend any good sites for simple and clear Photoshop painting tutorials, please feel free to post them here in the comments section. Thanks!