Too-toar-ee-uhl

Not really sure why I think anyone will read this cause most people on this sight at freakishly good and don't need my advice but i've always wanted to make one of these progress/tutorial deviations and have never before remembered to save all my source material. I usually save the whole project to one file so I can rarely go back and take progress shots. I also want to start doing live-streams soon. Anyway, the numbers here correspond to the numbers on the page so if it's not self explanatory or you want to know more, PLEASE READ:

1: opened a blank file in ps and quickly sketched out the idea of what I wanted to achieve, they way the general shape of the finished design would look like. Once I had something I thought was decent I moved on to step 2

2: printed out my quick sketch and with a pencil I drew in all the details I wanted to add to the design fleshing out the original concept and making it more solid. Since the design was symmetrical I only drew half so I could flip it later when I scanned it

3: after mirroring the image and cleaning up the borders and removing all the color I messed with the brightness and contrast to get rid of the original blue lines in the picture

4: normally at this point I would trace the pencil lines to get nice clean lines on their own layer for coloring, but I find that it saves time and makes a better finished product to draw directly on top of the original pencil sketch. I create a layer with the “multiply” blending mode and fill in where I want to color with a base. I then lock it and start shading using the dodge brush for light and multiply for shadows. The pallet at the top is the colors I used for each respectively.

5: when doing metal panels, I like to make sharp contrast between edges where two panels meet to make them more 3 dimensional. I turned up the opacity on my shading brushes to make dark and light edges respectively wherever an edge may be facing a light source. It's a fun exercise in geometry trying to calculate how bright or dark each one should be, but the more consistent you are, the more realistic it will look.

6: once I finished coloring the face and the wings I cut them out from the rest of the picture because for the rest of the details I needed clean thin lines. Once I had it separate from the background I was able to mess with the colors a bit till I found a combo I liked.

7: back to that thing I said I used to do. I traced the remaining elements of the drawinginto their own layer so I could work with clear lines and no rough edges because the remaining details needed to be more precise.

8: not sure why I added this picture. Maybe to show more metal shading? Dodge brush is awesome!

9: one of the most detailed elements of the picture (and one I didn't feel like waisting my time on drawing) is the soundboard. I used my cell phone to snap a quick pictur of our board during band practice then cut it out and pasted it right into the drawing.

10: using nothing much more than some lines and a bit of extra shading, I was able to make the board look like it was drawn with the rest of the picture. Added some lights to make it really pop. This project is a lot of fun at this point.

11: I wanted an awesome background that didn't distract from the very detailed foreground so I started scribing with some colors, transformed and mirrored it a few times, played with some sliders and filters , then decided it was too much one color, so I threw in a blue gradient and I liked the transition. Mirrored one more time for good measure.

12: I should have added this much earlier but you may have noticed a grainy texture on everything. I got that by duplicating the layer I wanted to texture, making it all flat grey, then adding some noise in the filter menu. I then change the blending more to overlay and adjust the opacity of the top layer till I have the amount of texture I want. It helps sometimes to blur it a bit so the “grainyness” isn't too sharp.

13: easily my favorite step of any drawing is adding the epic back-lighting. I create a new layer and just use my dodge-brush with a very low opacity to slowly build up color on every edge facing my imaginary light source. I try to create a duplicate layer over the elements I'm shading to make them darker so I can see the back light clearer as i'm drawing. This prevents me from overdoing it. Having this shading in it's own separate layer makes it easy to fix mistakes, but also allows me to change the color later on if I need too!

14: the finished product. I usually tweak some things once i'm done like the color or contrast, but mostly it's just a relief to have it all finished. And that's my superweak tutorial.

final piece: [link]