SOME FLOWER POWER

Just doing a quick post this week. Thought I would pass on just a couple thoughts on doing a digital painting. I find that when I am painting that either the Color Panel (set to Hue Cube – click the pop out in upper right corner to see other options) or Coolorus is open on the left side of my screen so colors in the same color palette can be selected very quickly by just clicking in the color areas. Coolorus is an inexpensive add-on for Photoshop CS6 and up. The Color Wheel  and the Mixer section Swatches, Color History, and Shades & Tones strips are all kept open so all you do is choose a color you want by clicking in it with your brush. For painting with the mixer brushes, the Current Brush Load needs to be set to Load Solid Color Only in the drop-down toggle menu. Then colors can be sampled using the ALT+click in the Mixer brushes also.

These are some of my favorite painting brushes I am using right now for most of my Photoshop painting. For this image the purple color was used as the major color and the rest of colors were mainly complementary greens. First started out with a purple background color – used a new Paint Bucket Tool preset by Grut (for website see sidebar at my Tidbits Blog) called FI Paper Deeds. On a layer above just drew a rough sketch of the leaves using Grut’s I Qwillo brush (one of my favorite drawing brushes!). Then painted in the leaves underneath using Gruts NM Pans Attic and OI Shiff Din brushes – made the brushes much smaller and just kept blending the colors using both brushes. The white flowers were painted in using my SJ 3 Pastel Van Gogh TI1 brush (see below for settings) and turned off the Color Dynamics sections to paint in centers. My sharp line texture png was added underneath and some green grass with flower were added that I had painted previously. Then a stamped layer was created (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E) and Topaz (for website see sidebar at my Tidbits Blog) Impression 2 where Rembrandt Portrait II preset was applied a little. Then on a New Layer the fence was drawn, Jai Johnson’s flying birds png was added and set to 23% layer opacity. Two text layers were created – one used Castile Inline Grunge font and the other a font called Chiller. Used one of my painted borders created a long time ago. Some little spatter marks were created using Grut’s FX Flick Tub brush. A purple light leak I created a while back was added to the right side of the image and one of Sebastian Michaels borders was added on top. Finished up the photo with Nik Viveza 2, and a Red Channel Luminosity Adjustment Curve. See my Related Blogs for more info on some of the techniques used above.

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This digitally painted image above is using the same basic workflow as above. I used a couple different brushes on the flowers and leaves, but overall pretty much the same results. The major trick is to find a brush to remove some of the sketch work without losing the definition of the petal. I used a mixer on this one to soften those lines. The mixer brush layer was lowered to add back in some of the texture in the leaves and blossoms. And definitely a lot of brush size variations to add detail versus smoothing. Underneath all the painting and sketch layers, Kim Klassen’s Dream texture (not sure it is still available) was added and set to 46% layer opacity (on top of a white background layer). The frame is from one of my Double Edged Frames layer styles that can be downloaded on DeviantArt.  Lots of fun but it does take some time to get a nice overall effect. My sketches were so rough looking it is amazing to me that it all pulls together.

Have a nice week and try a little illustration even if you are not that great at it. It is a lot of fun to try different Photoshop brushes and see what turns out……Digital Lady Syd

Brush Settings for SJ 3 Pastel Van Gogh TI1 brush: To make your own, follow my How to Create my Favorite Brush blog but with a couple important changes. First a small square was selected using the Marquee Tool showing a part of the plant Impression layer that showed some nice contrast and brush strokes in it. It was turned into a Pattern by going to Edit -> Define Pattern and name it. (I named mine TI Van Gogh). Next the Brush Panel Texture section was opened. Select the Pattern drop-down (little arrow on right side of pattern swatch) and go to the very bottom where the new Pattern is located. The setting for the pattern I created are: Scale 46%, Brightness -46, Contrast 34, check Texture Each Tip, Mode Color Dodge, Depth 38% and Depth Jitter 12%. Try adjusting all these settings to fit your particular pattern. This brush gives a nice stroke effect at both larger and smaller sizes. Then open the Color Dynamics section and check Apply per Tip, set the Hue Jitter to 2%, and Brightness Jitter to 11%.

Digital Lady Syd Related Blogs:
How to Create My Favorite Brush
How to Create Scanned Photoshop Brushes
How to Create Light Leaks to use Over Again
How To Make Frames or Borders
How to Use a Red Channel to Create a Nice Blended Image Effect