So. I figured I’d try to do some learnings on Tuesdays. Hopefully it’ll become a habit!
Here’s my starting image, I forget when I even made this baby!!
I did three of them so clearly I was up to something. I called them ‘devil form’ so…guess I was feeling demonic?
I decided cuz of her pose and handbag that 1, she was going out on the town in her new form, and 2, she was posing for a pic! I found a nice night life background of city lights, and decided to learn a few things. I learned how to import a friggin 3D OBJ file – waaaaah? We can do that?? Yep, we sure can! I imported a random bridge file and couldn’t find it at first. Then realized that was because it was behind the girl, and had no texture. I gave it a texture, figured out the controls for moving an object around, scaling it, etc., and it came out well enough. I put it under her with a basic stone type texture, and realized she didn’t have a shadow…
So I used this – Cast Shadow in Photoshop Tutorial – very happy with the skill level and techniques I learned, which always end up being applied to future pics too. That’s cool, did the shadow, didn’t use the mask technique because the shadow was pretty much set to where I’d want it.
Then I did a bit of lighting. There’s this whole light room thing in Photoshop now, I gave that a whirl. In the past it’s been really bitchy with me, as in I would go into it and it would freeze the program, or no tools would show up, or I couldn’t manipulate any of the lights. Today, probably because a few years have passed, it worked out. Hoping that is because of fixes and drivers, etc.
Here’s the tutorial for lighting – Add Lighting Effects in Photoshop – pretty basic but it gets you going and using stuff.
Then I started thinking I ought to make her look a bit nicer. I did Darthhell’s method of copying parts of her skin and pasting them into new layers, then using Screen as the layer mode, then blurring them with Gaussian Blur. I wish I could make an action for that, so it would be a one click option – but each skin section on any pic I’ve worked on tends to require a different degree of the blur. I tried to focus here on her fleshy bits facing towards this unseen light I had created.
I wanted to paint her hair, and I found this – An Introduction to Painting Realistic Hair in Adobe Photoshop – but when I started reading it, I got this deja vu feeling of being in school. Oh where did the time go, *pretends to look at watch but who wears one anymore*, guess I need to head to bed! Heh, yeah, so I just left her hair as is. I know how I would do it, and I am sharing the tutorial for the hair here for future reference. But it’s not needed for this.
So here’s the final product. I was trying to make it realistic but I gave up and used my good ol’ Darthhell action. That tends to make my images look painted to a degree, but really, I am so done! I finished that comic up earlier so I’m satisfied with my efforts. Plus I used my free time wisely and did the learnings. Yay me! Hope you like this.
