Introduction

The Meeting is a personal image, created mainly to improve my skills and try to achieve a more illustrational feel than I do in most of my other work. I had no ideas about how this image should turn out; the only thing I had in mind was that it should have a lot more detail than my other paintings. So, the goal was set and I made a couple of thumbnail sketches to find an interesting idea and composition.

After some simple sketches, I had the idea of a young man meeting his robot friend. Time to open up Photoshop!

The Brushes

I'm still a big fan of customized brushes and shapes. Those brushes give me the option to concentrate, in my opinion, on more important things such as composition, color balance and values. The use of them also speeds up the entire process.

Blocking In

Based on my simple sketches, I started to block in the main colors and shapes by using the Palm brush and a normal round brush. For the ground, I used a huge, hard, round brush to set the colors and the first "details” were made with customized shapes. When you work with customized shapes, Photoshop automatically creates a new layer. With the shapes on the new layer, I picked the Eraser tool and started to get rid of unnecessary areas or sections that had too much detail (Fig.01).