Painting In Photoshop: The Artist and The Mermaid/Christmas Piece 18/12/18 - 23/12/18

Having learned more on Photoshop, I decided to try my hand at doing anime/manga art. I decided to do a piece using my characters from my story The Artist & the Mermaid that I had sketched several days ago. I would've done the line art in Photoshop however I felt that the pen tools didn't seem to suit the theme of manga and so I decided to do the line art using the G-Pen tool in Clip Studio Paint.

The line art was sketched then saved as a Photoshop document and opened in Photoshop itself. I began by applying the base colours on the characters, based upon the colours from my other digital pieces that I'd done for this subject.

I did the characters in separate layers then began applying the shadings. However this was rather difficult given the direction of the light was from above. So I did the background first so I could establish the lighting from above. However I needed to establish the look of the characters when underwater so I sought inspiration from some anime pieces I'd seen on pinterest.

Inspirational material from Pinterest.

One piece of particular inspiration was a fan piece of the anime film Your Name, and it showed some key elements of underwater illustration artwork. From what I saw it seems the shading of the characters would be elements of the clothing and skin while the lighting would shine from above on the hair and eyes.

I painted the background and used some painted strokes to represent the waves of the ocean. In the past I have found doing underwater based animations to be rather difficult so I used a tutorial I'd found on Deviant art, to give me some guidance. This helped very well as one difficulty I had was with the waves in the sea and using small brush strokes helped to replicate that very well.

So I did traditional cell shading for the characters. I had originally decided to do the painting method I'd learned a while back. However I couldn't seem to get the painting blends correct so I decided to do traditional cell shading with the lasso tool.

I used the colour wheel to establish the shading colours by moving the picker down in an angle. One element that I felt I did well in was the hair of the character Charlie (The Artist). The highlights and shadowing looked similar to real life anime/manga pieces. I finished the piece by altering the colour balance tool so that the characters would look more blue like they were underwater.

Looking back on the piece I would say I'm beginning to get the hang of painting with Photoshop, and later on I applied these same methods to a anime piece that I did before Christmas using the more textured brushes, and some use of the soft shading brushes to do the classic blush on the skin.

Christmas Piece.

What I liked about this piece was the more painted shading and use of tools that help to create semi realistic fur on scarfs or woolly hoods on jackets. One other realistic element was the brush I used on the Christmas tree, as the tree looked bristled the brush created a similar effect.

I was impressed with both of these pieces and it felt like I was beginning to better understand the use of Photoshop in illustrations. I would think that Stephen, my fellow Uni student's advice was very helpful and I may look further into using Photoshop more for my concept art.

In conclusion I was rather pleased with these illustrations and they looked like realistic anime in my opinion but more development maybe needed. In future I shall continue to use Photoshop for further illustration work.