llll Tutorial ver.2: 3: BG and effects.}
Skip to step: [1.] [2.] [3.] [4] [index.]
I use similar techniques for my backgrounds, except I don't go as picky on the details as I do on the character. This picture gives a good variety of chances for me to show different ways of rendering effects.
1. Magical glow/light: Here I make use of the fading brush at low opacity. After creating a new layer on top of everything, I refer to my rough draft on how I want the lights to be. I would use the low opacity brush and draw the light orbs in many strokes, not 1 stroke, to create a smooth, soft glow, instead of a harsh ball of paint. I also use the eraser at a low opacity to erase the trails of the lights, which creates a different effect than using a brush to draw the same fading effect.
2. Sceneries: Sceneries are basically the same as drawing the foreground, except I don't use lineart. The process consists of finetuning what I already planned out in the preparations, Various techniques used in the character-colouring step are used in the steps below. For the stars, I used the mouse and drew a lot of dots on a new layer with the fading brush, because I can click and make sure that the dots are dots, not a scratch by the tablet. Then I lower the opacity and erase away the bottom to make it blend in with the gradient of the background.
3. Final touch: This is the magical step that I forget to use in many of my illustrations. The point of Photoshop is photomanipulation; taking an existing photo and making it into what you want, or simply making it look better by adjusting/faking some of the flaws that are there during the capture. Similarly, one can also take a finished image and adjust the flaws during painting. It is cheating in a way, but that's why I use photoshop instead of traditional :p
So with that point made, I have only made a slight overall adjustment to this image. I am a very bad colour-picker; most of my images tend to come out really gray-washed and lack contrast. In this image, one thing I don't like is the skin-tone of the character; because of the blue hue I chose for this image, I used a bad skin tone and she looks like stone. So I tried to redeem myself by selecting all of the coloured layers (and thus selecting all of the coloured areas of the foreground) by ctrl+mouse clicking all layers. Then I created a new layer on top of everything, switched the layer mode to overlay, and filled it with a shade of brown. Just like the colouring process, I can Hue/Saturation it to the shade I like, or erase away some of the faded colours (in this case, I did the latter as shown). This helped somewhat in giving the character a bit more life than she had.
And the illustration is complete!
Skip to step: [1.] [2.] [3.] [4] [index.]