Saturday, July 26, 2014

By the Campfire 2

This is the continuation of my blogpost last week. I'm coloring the pencil sketch drawing of the forest critters by the campfire using Photoshop and a Wacom Intous pen/tablet. Below I started playing around with the colors I had in mind. At first I didn't want the colors to be too bright because it was night time and colors wouldn't be as bright as when its daytime. However, I ended up making it brighter later because it felt flat and uninteresting.


On this next screenshot, I've brightened up my colors and added some bit of shadows. The nice thing about Photoshop is that its easy to change colors and it's also easy to get the darker or lighter tone of the same color. I found the background behind the trees too bright and lacking in texture. So in the next screenshot, I had darkened the background and used textured brushes as well.


I then added darker shadows and the yellow fire. Now it's starting to feel warm and cozy. I must say, my favorite parts are the bluish green plant at the lower right and the daisies beside it. They both came out much nicer than I had expected. I like the effect of the pencil shading on those areas. I should do a lot more of my tonal values when I do my pencil sketch and not just rely on the digital coloring. The pencil shading gives it a lot more texture.


I thought the scene was too serene and "clean", the wind is probably not blowing much too, so I added in the fireflies. Nothing like bugs to make the night by the campfire feel magical and real. I love the effect the fireflies created.


This is officially my first digital painting using Photoshop. It definitely was a different experience compared to using the traditional paints. There were times when I terribly missed the texture created by real brushes and paints. The layers feature of Photoshop is quite powerful. I could turn the whole painting to a much darker night scene by just placing a bluish layer over the entire thing. I also like the fact that one could combine both traditional drawing and digital painting in creating the image. It is quite a powerful technique.

1 comment:

emilie said...

Thanks Din! Yeah this one exceeded my expectations. I would have liked more texture on it but will continue to explore it in the future. Miss you na. Kay hilom kaayo ka sa fb, its great that you dropped by here. :)