When I’m not working on full illustrations for books covers, interior illustrations, or even inks and paintings, I try to sketch. It can be considered practice, or working out ideas, and sometimes it’s even just for fun.
Sketches often come in the form of pencil drawings, the traditional means. Occasionally I’ll sketch in ink, but not very often. I do, however, stop and manipulate photos sometimes, which I consider a form of sketching. Much like pencil works can become final pieces, digital photo work and editing can either stay as lost tests, or become full pieces themselves.
Now, just to be clear, my manipulations aren’t just slapping some photos together and screeching, “ART, BITCHES!”. I spend a good amount of time using Photoshop’s brushes to paint in sections, dodge and burn areas, use blending modes, and even add in fully illustrated parts from scratch. It’s just that they start from photos, and use lots of other photos, as opposed to my normal methods of creating everything you see in my works from scratch (see the latest examples of that here and here).
So, as is often the case, I peruse the free photo sites I have bookmarked for just the right photo. After making sure they truly are “free’ photos, without copyright or royalty (sometimes I just use my own pics to avoid that), I’m off. In this case, I started with a photo of a little girl, one that, naturally, I’m going to twist a bit (click on every picture for larger versions):
Something I wanted to show too, that I probably haven’t in all of the similar things I’ve wrote on this site, is that the textures that I use don’t always work. I look through my files, or on sites like Spectrum Textures or Image After, for just the right texture to use. I’ll see one, pop it into the image, and then see if I can make it work.
Here’s a case where it didn’t. You can see the effect on her face, and it just doesn’t work. I left the original texture here in the image, for you to see.
So I found a different texture, and started in with that instead. I’d like to say there’s a “science” involved, but it’s really just how I feel about a particular texture once it’s on there. Sometimes I win, sometimes I get up and get a coffee, and forget all about this art thing.
I added a few textures over the image, and here’s where the trick begins. At this point, it just looks like a big mess. It’s almost a faith, something you have to see in the image as it is to know if it’s going to work out or not. It still might fail badly, but I can start to see an endgame now at this point. Since these really are sketches, they didn’t start with a particular idea in mind. I just let the brain go where it wants, and hopefully it works out in the end.
I toyed with her look a bit, but I just decided that she could never look scary enough. There are some children’s faces that, once manipulated, have an intriguing evil in their innocence. There are plenty of film examples of children like that, but I don’t think she’s one of them.
So I looked around in my files, and on a few texture/photos sites, and found a perfect picture of a piranha that would look nice. I added it, and I liked where it was going. Over the top of that I added a ram skull, which in the end didn’t work. But on one of the blending modes, it left just enough to have a decent influence on the art, so I left it.
I liked the color and the contrast of her face, but it was radically different than her surroundings. I found a couple of other textures, most notably a reddish stone texture, and laid it over the top of the photo. I then used a Photoshop brush with a “random” tip setting, and masked out certain portions of it. It gave me a nice, reddish tone to the piece, and also a bit of texture in the randomness of the mask.
I added a blurry skull layer (which you can’t see the skull part, really), then set the blending mode to “Hue”. That worked pretty slick, so I masked it off in a few places for color accent. When I was going through the blending modes, some of them were very subdued, which gave me a few ideas about the piece’s color.
I decided I was losing too much contrast in the art, and I thought about working that over. While I was searching in my files for the stone layer in the last step, I saw one of the cloud photos that I took. I thought it might be fun to throw that on top, and see how it influenced the layers beneath it.
What I found was a good example of the differences that each of the blending modes in Photoshop can give. In this first case, I set the blending mode to “color burn”, and I picked up a very disturbing, and very dark image that really looked great:
The I set the blending mode to “Vivid Light”, and it came out looking radically different. But still very cool, it almost looks like it’s on fire.
In the end, though, I wanted something in between. Strong highlights and shadows, sure, but not quite so harsh. So I left the blending mode on “overlay”, and then moved the cloud layer around to get the highlights and shadows where I want them.
Much like the other layers, that gives a chaotic randomness that doesn’t usually appear in my other works, where I’m creating the shadows directly. Using a layer for that, especially another photo, means that light and shadows both end up in unique spots, making this process very fascinating and a bit “by the seat of my pants”.
I decided that her eyes just weren’t working, and there were a few other spots that needed adjusting. I used a combination of brushes, smudge tools, and burn tools to get a bit more out of it. I also added texture from a lizard to her front, which really added a different dimension to it. Once I was happy with it, I called it good and walked away.
Here is the new final piece, and it’s just about as far away from the original photo as you can get. It’s called Sleep of the Dark Ones, and it has certainly turned out to be one of my more macabre pieces. Opinions?
