Making Of 'The Park'

The goal of this tutorial is to give you some insight into my process and to show how you can achieve a believable illustration using color and value as opposed to concentrating on rendering.

The intial lay-in

For most of the painting I keep it zoomed out to 25% so that I can see the entire piece as I am working. Sometimes I will zoom in to 50%, but I try not to zoom in any more than that. If you work at 100% you will not be able to see how the painting looks as a whole, and will often times end up over-rendering. Working at 25% will also help you create a more loose painting. Another helpful tip is to constantly flip the image so that you can better see your errors and how your composition is working out. I usually work for a while one way, flip the image and paint on the flipped version for a while, and then go back and forth until I am finished painting. Sometimes I flip the image upside down as well.

I like to start my paintings by laying down a basic colored background and large silhouettes. At this stage I am using a large brush and am only concerned with shapes and composition. The brush I start with is a Photoshop default with opacity set to pressure.

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Colour

After establishing some basic colours in the first stages I will then go back and tweak the colours more to my liking.

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Here I wanted some warmer colours to give you more of a sense of a sunny day. I hit ctrl+b to bring up the color balance menu. Here you can use the sliders to change the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. I will also change the levels in conjunction with the color balance.

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

I also wanted more of a "glowing" effect on the man's jacket, so I decided to use color burn. Most people will tell you to never use the burn/dodge tool, but if you know how to use them they can be a great tool. What I do, instead of using the dodge tool, is to set the actual brush's setting to "color dodge" from the drop down menu.

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

I want a yellow/orange glow, so I pick a darker version of the colour that I actually want. This way you can build up the glow slowly. After I am pleased with the new color scheme I continue blocking in shapes, but still leaving things loose

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Final Stages

Now I start to refine things a bit more and add in the details of background and middle ground elements.

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

I added some shoes to the guy on the left, but decided that they were too distracting, so I let them fade off into shadow. One thing to really pay attention to are shadow shapes. They can really help to bring a picture to life and to also suggest form without having to really paint the entire image.

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

 

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Now I start to refine the light and dark side of the trees and add in the bench.

_park_11=.jpg

_park_11=.jpg

_park_12=.jpg

_park_12=.jpg

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_park_13=.jpg

_park_14=.jpg

_park_14=.jpg

_park_15=.jpg

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_park_16=.jpg

_park_16=.jpg

The blue I used on the bench was a little too saturated, so I had to go back and desaturate it. I leave the shapes in the background large and unrefined so that they do not distract from the figures. This also adds some atmosphere and depth to the painting.

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

I feel pretty good about the painting so I sign it and go eat cookies.

Fig.

Fig.


To see more by Daarken, check out Elysium: The Art of Daarken

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