Using this brush will give me some harder edges than the rectangular brush I used for blocking in the main shapes. Edge control is a very important aspect of a painting, and can cause an illustration to either succeed or fail. Most of the time I use the hard, round brush for when I am painting elements such as railings, poles, and wires. I try not to use the Shift key for drawing straight lines, but instead I just do them freehand. Doing this will give more life to your painting and it won’t look so mechanical. Some of the lines look pretty straight, but that is only because I will keep redrawing the same line over and over until I am satisfied with the way it looks. Remember that the Ctrl + Z (Undo) hot keys are your friends. For many of the colours I have been picking colour directly from the photo, simply because it saves a lot of time. I would actually advise against doing this because it doesn’t require any thought. In time you will start to lose the understanding of colour and you will not be able to identify which colour is which. You will begin to catch yourself thinking, “is that colour more blue or yellow?”. It is good practice to look at a colour in a photo and try to pick the colour yourself just by looking at it. Also picking colours from a photo is generally bad practice simply because colours in photos are usually not very accurate, and can be washed out or dull. But anyway, I am being bad and colour-picking here! I wanted some more colour harmony in my piece, so I decided to change the Colour Balance of the illustration (Fig13). An easy way to do this without actually changing your painting is by clicking on the half-black, half-white circle at the bottom of your layers palette. Doing this will open up a window, inside which you can then change the different options – I chose Colour Balance. The colour balance dialogue box will open, and it is here that you can change your colours. I pulled the sliders towards more Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan. You can also change the tonal balance by selecting Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. It is fun to play around with these different settings.

Fig.13

The Final Touches:

All that is left now is to add in some of the final details to the buildings, like the windows, signs, and railings (Fig14 -17).

Fig.14

Fig.15	Fig.16

Fig.17

I am also adding in the rest of the cars on the left-hand side. These steps only take a few minutes because I am painting pretty loosely. One of the things I always battle with is how refined I should make the illustration. For this painting I wanted a more painterly feel, and not something that looked too photo realistic. You can see by the detailed shot that the cars are pretty loose, especially the ones that are further away from the viewer (Fig18).

Fig.18

3DTotal Advertisement - We need your support!

Even when I am painting something this small I still paint zoomed out to about 25%. This allows me to keep things looser, and I can also judge what it will look like zoomed out at the same time. I think the hardest thing that I battled with in this illustration was the sign on the right (Fig19 - 21). Adding lettering to any illustration is tricky, because people like to read things in paintings, and often they take a lot of focus away from the rest of the piece. I didn’t want the sign to be too much of a focal point, and I have been avoiding finishing the rest of the text. In the end I finished the text, but I tried to keep the value range between the letters and the background fairly similar so as to not call too much attention to it.

Fig.19	Fig.20

Fig.21

Final Image

Page 1

Page 2

Discuss this Making Of in our Forums here.

To keep up with the latest Tutorials and Interviews on 3DTotal, sign-up to the free
Bi-monthly Newsletter Here!