Painting in Photoshop: The Dancer & The Shoe Maker: Watercolour painting in Photoshop: 31/12/18:

The Dancer & The Shoe Maker.

The year of 2019 was almost upon us and I wanted to do one last piece for 2018 and so I decided to do an illustration of one of my most recent story ideas of the Dancer & the Shoemaker. Many days before I had recently been watching a Netflix anime series named the Children of the Wales. What I liked about it besides the good story line was the background artwork which looked like a watercolour painting piece with cell shaded characters standing within it. I was feeling inspired to use something similar in my work.

Most coincidentally I had recently found a tutorial on doing watercolour artwork in Photoshop. This also included a link to the custom brush the narrator had made for this piece. Being one who jumps at the chance to learn something new I decided to download the brush which was on a google drive and add it to the brush presets I already had.

This was a chance to try and use the inspiration of the anime on my background. I began by doing a hand drawn sketch of this and the characters, as the sketch lines in my view related to what the Children of the Wales learned. Then I tested the water colour brush to see how it works. I tested on the rough sketch of Joseph (The Shoe Maker).

I could see that setting the painting layer to multiply was very helpful in capturing the hand drawn elements of the sketch and so I would use a similar method on the background.





I began painting the background, starting with the golden audience stands followed by the red curtains the stage and the seats. The seats were a rather difficult challenge as there were so many. I felt this was one area that I needed to work hard on. I had gotten this done with the darker red colour tone with the water colour tool.

One area that I was intrigued with was discovering I could apply a dark shade of colour such as grey and, it in turn, created a shadow like effect in the colours the same applied when I applied a white colour to do some highlights.

In colouring the characters the line art was done using Clip Studio and painting was done using Photoshop. This was a combination of cell shading with the bristle brush tool. The flats were applied then the shadowing and highlights. Much like the Artist and the Mermaid the most impressive part was the shading and highlights of the hair as I remembered that the shading and highlights were linked to the source of the hair strands and the shadows in the edges of the hair.

One other element that I liked was the painting I did over some of the line art, which was inspired by Loish's work.

Looking back on the final result I would think this piece was just as illustrative as my Artist and the Mermaid piece. I would think I'm becoming more familiar with Photoshops Illustrative capabilities. I realise now that Photoshop has functions that Clip Studio doesn't have, but at the same time it gives me something to investigate and see if the same functions or something similar is possible in its distant relative.

However I feel some improvements maybe made in terms of simplifying the characters shading to make it more anime than painted, but I can't help if I like to make a detailed painting from an illustration. However I shall look into more simple ways of illustration in Photoshop.

Overall I am rather pleased with my illustration and will look forward to developing my skills further using Photoshop CC.