For this tutorial I've scanned in an image of a girl I call Lyanna who is peeking around the corner of a building. It's supposed to be a night shot so the pallette is going to be very cool, full of blues and dark greens and dark browns.
Once the image is scanned in, we select the entire canvas and copy and paste it. Painter automatically pastes this selection into a new layer.
Move the second layer so that it is directly above the first layer, so that all of your lines overlap the original. Make this layer invisible by clicking on the eye in the objects palette.
I paint the same way I would with real paints, back to front, large and simple to complex detail. With that in mind, let's lay down some huge swathes of color to roughly define our composition.
The background behind Lyanna's head is going to be a very dark brownish red. As it is farthest away from our eye, let's get that in first. I used a variable round brush set to size 50 for this.
This is one of the best parts about Painter, you'll notice that the variable round brush does not set down a single color in a stroke, but rather, several colors based on the color you selected. This gives our image the look of real brushstrokes and the texture that can be found in such a technique will further help to define our image and make it feel "alive".
Also note that this brush is rather useless on a default canvas of 72 dpi. The pixels are simply too big, and the variable brush looks ugly and weird instead of adding strokes to our imagery.
Make sure you're painting on the Canvas layer, and not the second layer. Don't worry about being precise, block in the area with good broad strokes, you'll notice that I've painted over Lyanna's hair and the leaf objects on the left side of the canvas. As I don't know exactly how those will be formed in the final image, I simply paint the background and then I'll paint the actual elements over the background.
Now, let's block in Lyanna using a very low saturated flesh tone.
Lyanna is wearing a black chest piece so we'll get a very dark, very low saturated blue color. Note that it's not actually black. Black stands out on a canvas very quickly and typically should only be used for the very darkest of darks.
Now it's time to block in the building wall that Lyanna is peeking from behind. I'm going to make this wall a dark copper color.
Now, although there is a lot of foliage in the immediate foreground, we're not going to worry about it yet. For the most realism, only the subject of your image should be in focus, your eye does not see everything in focus at the same time. Because the foliage is so close to the viewer, it's going to be very fuzzy and indistinct, bleeding into the rest of image. If we blocked that stuff in now, we'd have to go back in later trying to add detail around the immediate foreground, and that would be ridiculously hard to accomplish well. Remember, back to front, large to small.
First blocking is now done.
Let's move onto second blocking. This is where I start adding shadows and darker colors to the previous blocked out areas to give the painting some depth definition.
Starting with the extreme background behind Lyanna's head, I pick a very dark brown and lower the opacity to about 8% Then I gradually build up the darkness behind her head, gradually get lighter as I move towards the light which in this case is located in the upper left hand corner.
I then take a lighter color and build up a little light area in the upper left hand of the corner to provide a bit of contrast.
Now we're going to go in for the second blocking of the Lyanna and her hair. Unfortunately, since I painted over her hair with the background color, I have very little clue as to where I should paint her hair. Here's where the 2nd layer comes in. Make it visible in the Object manager by clicking the eye. Now the second layer completely hides the first layer. However, we don't want that, we just want to see our original drawing as a guide, so select the second layer in the object manager and set the composite method to Gel. Think of this compositing method as like a transparency that your teacher might have used projected on the wall. Only black comes through, and since we've have a black and white sketch, we get something like this.
Much better, no we can see exactly where her hair goes, so, in the Object manager, make sure you've selected the Canvas layer again so you're not painting on your guide. Now, Lyanna is blonde, so I select a very de-saturated yellow tan and block in her hair. Without the guide, we now have something like this.
Let's block in the shadows and highlights. Make your highlight brush about half the size as your shadow brush. As hair gets lighter, your brush should get smaller to reflect the shininess quality to hair.
Now, we block in the shadows and highlights of the face and neck. Remember, we're still blocking in, so don't go all hyper over details.
At this point I find Lyanna's hair terribly unattractive, so I give her a stylistic cut to enhance her looks. I select the background color and paint right over her hair.
Right, onto blocking in the values of her black chestpiece.
Now let's move onto the copper wall she's standing beside. The orange I started with is too bright for this nighttime composition, so I'm going to clean it up and shift a bit towards the blues.
Now we block in the basic shading for the wall. We create our straight edges and lines by using the Straight feature in the Control: Brushes window. When painting metal surfaces, especially flat ones like this one, remember that the brush strokes will really stand out. Make sure you paint in the direction of the surface so your strokes are uniform in appearance.
Metal has a lot of sharp edges, and abrupt transitions must be preserved between light and dark colors. To do this, let's create a mask. Masks are created from selection sets. At first glance it would appear that Painter is sadly lacking, for masking purposes they provide only a simple lasso, magic wand, and marquee tool. But what if you need to create straight sided selections that involve more then 4 sides?
The answer lies in the pen tool. I select it from the tool palette.
Then I draw a polygon around the area I don't want my brush strokes to go into while painting.
Now, in the Control panel, or the shapes menu, convert the shape into a selection.
Now, the way this selection will work, is anything within our selection will be paint-able and outside of it will not. Which, unfortunately is not what we want. From the selection menu, invert the selection so the marching ants surrounds everything but our little triangle sliver.
Now from the Objects window, hit the save selection button. A popup window will ask you where to save it, save it to the default New mask. Notice from the mask menu within the Object window, a new mask is created. Turn it on by clicking the closed eye to see what it looks like.
But with the mask visible, it makes it very hard to see what you're painting, so let's make it invisible by clicking on the eye icon again so all we see are the marching ants. If you ever leave the selection accidentally, remember that all you have to go to the mask menu in the object manager select the appropriate mask and click the load mask button.
The result of all this mask work? A nice clean edge.
A bit more working of the mid-tones and we get the following.
Now, before I move on to the third pass, I'm going to go back to Lyanna and adjust the shadows in her hair and her face so they match her environment. We have a natural undertone in place , now I go over it with a brush with navy blue to tone it all down.
I do the same thing with hair, except with a really dark magenta/red. Almost all hair has red in it which is made more evident in really bright situations on darker haired people, and darker situations on light haired people.
Alright, time for the third pass. This is where I start adding details (and invariably, finishing them) The brown background needs some texture, so I'll add some areas of dark and light close to each other on the canvas to simulate bumps and other irregularities in the surface. Use a small brush. Enhance what's already on your canvas, where it is dark, make it darker, where it is light, lighten it even further. With texture, I'll jump out of variable brushes into impasto so I can get a more random dirty texture a bit faster.
Remember, big to little. The farther away from the mid-tone value you get, the smaller your brush should be as the lightest and darkest parts of your image should be very small.
All right, let's add facial details. We'll start with the eyes by blocking in a very unsaturated mid-tone blue. No white! White and Black are reserved for very special highlights and shadows, and the whites of an eye do not qualify.
Now we add a darker blue grey tone to make the whites reflect the environment they're in as well as make them round instead of two flat spots on the face.
Alright, let's add some irises. We use a very very very dark blue and finally, for the pupils, we'll add some black.
Let's add the eyebrows. I use a very dark magenta, then lighten them as they face the light and darken them in the opposite direction.
Now we add lashes, darken the sockets a bit and add some definition to the eyelids.
Now we add the nostrils, add some definition shadows and highlights. Again we use a bit of black to push the depth of the nostrils.
Now, for the mouth. The actual line used to separate the top and bottom lip is a very dark purple, almost black. The lips are rendered with a very dark magenta.
Shade and shadow, the lips should be darker then the rest of the flesh tone, so we need to make especially sure we choose values that will prevent the lips from standing out like a stop sign.
Add a darker tone underneath the lower lip to show the indentation between the lip and the chin. Two darker tones with highlights run between the upper lip and the nose.
Now we add some darker shades to the jawbone area to help separate it from the neck.
The extreme right side of the face (viewer right) needs to be shaded ever so slightly as it is directly away from the light. Also, at this point, we'll go in with a detail shadow brush and bring out the ear.
Time to work on the highlights and the flesh tone of the lighted side of the face. I used a paintbrush with a mid-tone magenta for this section to help bring back some pink to her face and used a very small very light unsaturated magenta brush for the brightest highlights.
Ok, let's move on to the chest piece now. Looking at the chest piece it's a bit too purple for my liking, so I'm going to go over it with a low saturated low opacity blue brush. I'm then going to work on blending my highlights and shadows more smoothly as her chest piece is a pretty smooth piece of clothing. To do this, I usually use a fairly large sized brush, around 40, set to a low opacity 8% or lower. After I've got all the shading done, I go in with a opaque brush set to a dark navy blue and paint over the chest piece where the cast shadows from the foreground leaves are going to fall.
Moving towards the viewer we now must move onto the hair. Hair is one of the most important defining characteristics, so particular attention must be paid to it to get it the way we want it. Because of our initial painting of the face, the rogue strand that hangs over Lyanna's face has all but disappeared. Let's bring it back.
Hair is composed of individual strands, and for the best looking results, you're going to need a very small brush, I wouldn't go so far as working each individual strand, but you need to get small. Here, I'm painting the hair with a brush size of 2-3. Remember, the dark part of hair shades to darker and darker shades of red/magenta. Blond hair highlights vary, but in this case, they're going to go slightly golden, and then the ultra highlights come in as pure white. Use the white sparingly, but remember to use it, hair looks dull and flat without the white highlights. Also remember to crank your opacity up to 75% to 100% as we're using stroke and form to define the graduation instead of washes.
Now we put in the highlights and shading on the lit side of the head.
I've determined that on the dark side of head, the hair is much too bright, so I'm going to damp it down with some dark magenta. In addition, I'm going to block in the out of focus leaf that I described in my initial sketch that separates her hair into light and dark sections. Because the dark side is so dark, the necessity to draw the hair with a small brush is not needed. After tamping down the brightness of that side of the face, I simply go through with a near black brush to add a little shading to the masses of hair on that side of the head. Notice how I've left a hint of blond still peeking through the dark magenta to help define the hair mass.
Okay, enough of Lyanna, let's work on the wall she's standing next to her. My first instinct tells me to run to library of textures, get some grit and specular textures and apply them to create a fabulous perfect metal texture. Unfortunately, such a course of action would stick out like a sore thumb in this image. So, we're going to have to do metal some other way.
Key things to remember when painting metal. Metal has very bright highlights, almost always they'll be white or near white. Depending on how much light is hitting the metallic surface, the highlight will either be very big or very small. Regardless, there is usually little blending, the highlight runs smack into the shadow so the key to remember with metal, is that it usually is a medium of contrasts, use your darkest darks and your brightest colors to depict it.
With that in mind, I'm going to plunge the darker areas into darkness and make the highlights smaller as well as brighter.
Time for the some leaves. There's a branch with leaves that touches Lyanna's right shoulder and it's in focus, so let's get those blocked out and rendered. Again, we start with a very dark blue green black to establish the object's shape and give us a base to start from.
Now we go with a lighter green to roughly define the lighter parts of the leaf and branch.
Finish the shading using lower opacity brushes to get some natural transitions.
Use a fine brush to get some leaf veins and add the highlights.
Right-o, last lap. Lyanna is peeking from behind some foliage, so using a very low opacity brush that is set to a larger size, about 50, we paint in the foliage that will help give our painting "reach back factor." That which gives us enough depth so it will look like we could actually reach into the picture. Keep the opacity down! These are very close to the viewer and should be highly blurred, their presence should be felt, but their distinct shape should not come through.
I frequently paint brighter then I really would like to, it's just a habit of mine, so I use the brightness and contrast controls to tone down the brightness. A 10 second change. Isn't the digital world wonderful?
