Painting In Photoshop:15/12/18: New Heights (Sonic Fan art) First try Photoshop Painting.

New Heights illustration.

One of my fellow Students at University of Salford recently suggested I should try doing some painting in Photoshop, as it is an industry used tool in concept art and animation. I decided to try but did have some concerns about some of the brushes. However if one day we'd be doing industry based work I decided to familiarise myself with painting in Photoshop. I decided to start with a simple Sonic fan piece that I decided to do over the Christmas term with my new Cintiq.

I began with some simple line art using the hard round brush tool on Sonic. Then I began painting the flat colours. I then painted the background using a reference image of hills in Cornwall from my summer holiday.

I was having difficulty with some of the brushes for certain elements. Such as the rocks and grass in the clips and islands. However as I painted I was getting more confident in using the brushes. The shading of the trees and texture shown through the rounded bristle brush, were helping a lot with the trees and cliffs. The clouds I created using the same brush with a little help from a tutorial.

I felt that this looked a little good for a first try in painting with Photoshop. I then shaded Sonic with the lasso tool to do some cell shading and had the lighting come onto his face. The shading came from behind him. The shading I felt looked good on Sonic and it did resemble some traces of anime style artwork.

Looking back on my first try in Photoshop I would think that the piece didn't look so bad even for my first go. However I feel perhaps I need to improve, on my knowledge of the brushes within Photoshop and perhaps learn from a few tutorials and magazines about painting with the software. In hindsight I should've looked at some tutorials to begin with before I started to get an idea of how it works.

In conclusion I was rather pleased with the piece and hope to improve upon this and learn from it in the future. In future I shall look at tutorials to self teach myself to do art in Photoshop.