Basic Colouring
With the light and dark areas in place, I started to consider the colour. This was done very simply by painting over the current image with the airbrush in color mode.For the moment, I decided to use simple browns and pinks for the skin tones.
Don't do this!
As I'm trying to make this a comprehensive guide, I will document some of my mistakes too. I made my first error here, having mistakenly painted over the SKETCH layer rather than the background, so I decided to merge the layers and paint directly over the outline. Then it was time to lose my flow (and my sanity) completely:
Disaster 1: I cut the image with the Magic Wand and pasted it onto a red backdrop, messing up the anti-aliasing around the woman’s face. I also noticed that I had been a bit reckless with the airbrush and had lost some of the definition on the man’s nose and cheek. I loaded a previous stage and tried to cut the man and paste him over the messed up image (not so well I must add) and a bit later on I rubbed through certain areas with the eraser.
Disaster 2: I brushed in the woman's hair very loosely and decided to run a filter over it before going to work with the smudge tool. I selected the hair I wanted to filter with the Lasoo tool and chose Paint Daubs from the Filter/Artistic pull down. Sometimes I use this on hair to sharpen the details and disperse the colour which can be worked into the hair to give it more tones and variation, and less of a monochrome look.
As I'm trying to make this a comprehensive guide, I will document some of my mistakes too. I made my first error here, having mistakenly painted over the SKETCH layer rather than the background, so I decided to merge the layers and paint directly over the outline. Then it was time to lose my flow (and my sanity) completely:
Disaster 1: I cut the image with the Magic Wand and pasted it onto a red backdrop, messing up the anti-aliasing around the woman’s face. I also noticed that I had been a bit reckless with the airbrush and had lost some of the definition on the man’s nose and cheek. I loaded a previous stage and tried to cut the man and paste him over the messed up image (not so well I must add) and a bit later on I rubbed through certain areas with the eraser.
Disaster 2: I brushed in the woman's hair very loosely and decided to run a filter over it before going to work with the smudge tool. I selected the hair I wanted to filter with the Lasoo tool and chose Paint Daubs from the Filter/Artistic pull down. Sometimes I use this on hair to sharpen the details and disperse the colour which can be worked into the hair to give it more tones and variation, and less of a monochrome look.
Looks bad, eh?
I decided to rework the messed up area with the airbrush and smudge tool and eventually arrived at the following stage:
Smoothing
At this point, I decided to smooth out some of the irregular brush strokes. This was done first with the blur tool and then by blending the shades together with the smudge tool, as shown in the following example.
1.Uneven gradient with steps between each shade.
2.Blur tool used to soften these steps.
3.Smudge tool and soft brushes used to blend steps.
2.Blur tool used to soften these steps.
3.Smudge tool and soft brushes used to blend steps.
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