Making of Black Bashi - Bazoukby George Patsouras, USA


For the blending process, I generally use a hard edged brush and speckled one to blend, with lower opacities for smoother transitions (anywhere from 25%-50% under opacity). You don’t need a lot of layers for this stage; One for the background and one for the figure should be fine. Keep things simple. When you’re happy with the values you set up, you can now turn on Size Jitter turned off under ‘Pen Pressure’ and start working in the details. Create new layers and constantly merge them with the base layer to keep things under control.

Here is the finished grayscale painting. Even in grayscale, the painting looks ‘complete’. It’s a good idea to have your painting as refined as possible before adding colors. This will make the color process that much easier.



Adding Colors

When we have a decent painting in grayscale completed, it’s time to think about colors. Since this is a Master Copy, a good idea is to step back from our painting for a bit and carefully observe the colors in the original painting. Make sure the HSB slider is turned on at this stage, under the colors menu. With the original painting open, select the Eyedropper tool and carefully observe the color transitions throughout the painting. Do this for a couple of minutes and try to process how the artist went about colors.

In this case, the main color scheme is that of a fairly saturated red/orange. The darkest areas are that of a very saturated red, and the lighter tones shift more towards an orange/yellow hue. With that in mind, we’re now ready to start adding color to our painting. Since we’ve worked with the grayscale mode, it’s time to change it to the RGB mode. Select Image > Mode > RGB.


Since we spent the time observing the main color scheme, the first thing we do is create a new layer above the base layer and set it to ‘color’. Select a fairly red/orange mid tone for the base, since this is the main color theme, and merge it. Create another layer, this time for the skin. Observe the shifts in color from the reference photo and try to replicate it. The shadows on the face, for instance, has very saturated red tones, while the highlights are that of an orange/yellow tone. Do your best to replicate that while choosing your colors from the HSB sliders. Now merge. Repeat this process over and over again to build up your colors.