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I absolutely love direct sunlight on hard surfaces as a subject for painting study. When you understand how colour works inside a shaded areas and in the lit areas, and then apply that in your paintings, you can start to see photo-real lighting emerges. It’s quite exciting and satisfying to see such lighting come together, and painting in photoshop makes it easier than using natural media.
So here’s a step-by-step tutorial on painting such a piece in photoshop. Tablets at the ready!
Source Photograph
Before we even start step 1, we need to consider our source image. I got mine from EveBlackwoodStock on deviant art. I searched under the term ‘shadow’ I think, under ‘stock photography’.
Either way, that deviant art account has some great images if you like this kind of lighting – and they’re high res too.
Step 01: A little bit of cheating is required…
So what I mean by cheating is that to get such a photo real effect, your perspective has to be spot on. Now, if you like you can work it out by ‘guess work’ so as to perfect your perspective ‘eye’.
I myself didn’t want to do that for this painting as I wanted to focus on light and texture. So I drew in perspective lines in a layer on top of the source photo, then dragged that layer into my photoshop document and worked out the rest.
The above image is the resulting line-work which I will use as a guide to paint within.
My document was only 2500 px wide at 72dpi. I would suggest doubling that to 5000px @ 72dpi. I didn’t want to suffer too much lag due to high file size.
Step 02: Blocking in the light and shade
This is an important stage as here we’re getting the overall light values down.
Something I learned about digital painting (or any painting for that matter) along the way is the importance of a decent value range in your images. Most amateurs, you’ll notice, tend to have very medium/grey values in their overall range. It works well, as in the reference used here, to work with good contrast levels.
Already, if you squint at the above image, you’ll get a vague sense of photo-real lighting.
TIP: Try not to colour pick at this stage, although a technique I can advise is to guess your colour, then paint it over the reference photo and see if you got it right!
Take the ground for example. Pick a nearly white creamy/peach and paint onto the ground in the reference photo. If you see almost no difference you got it right, if you’re way out then observe whether you’re too light/dark/saturated etc. and adjust accordingly.
This will help develop your understanding of colour in no time!
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