A Digital Color Tutorial

Alright, so I've had a lot of people asking me to post something like this and I figured it's finally time to make a guide to how I do my digital coloring on my drawings and bring them to a finish. If you have any questions that I didnt cover, let me know and Ill do my best to answer them. This is just a general outline of how I tend to work digitally.



Ok. So heres the initial drawing, graphite on BFK Rives Tan with all the layers turned off.




After I scan in my image, I take the time and select separate parts of my drawing. That way, if I need to select the just the shirt, or just the glass, I can just use the magic wand tool. This really cuts down on the time I spend later and makes things a lot less confusing. I keep this layer hidden at the top of all my other layers at all time so I can easily get to it.




At this point, I start laying in the colors. Ill select an area, and fill it in with a flat color, usually keeping it pretty low on the saturation side. In some cases i'll set the layer mode to 'Color' and in other cases Ill just leave it on 'Normal' (usually for the lighter parts and highlights). Then i just start pushing and pulling the values to make them fit; in this image, the glass was the most saturated and complicated. I usually try and use photoshop to my advantage and make it work with what I already have in order to not get that digital feel. It's all about making it look like it was done in one medium. In addition to adding specific colors to separate the parts of the drawing, I usually add a 'Gradient Adjustment Layer' over everything on a low opacity of about 20%, which helps to unify everything in the piece.




This stage is where some of the more stylistic elements come in. I ended up scanning in a few images of smeared graphite that i layered over the drawing. [[I take the black and white image of the texture, turn it into Grayscale Mode, select the channel as a selection from the 'Channels' section, fill in the selection with a color on a separate layer, and then drag that entire layer over to my actual drawing. It's just a confusing way of explaining how I get a texture with a transparent background]]. In this particular piece, i changed the smeared texture to a goldish color and layered it a couple times to get a glazing effect. To make it seem more ethereal, I set the layer modes to 'Screen' and 'Overlay'. I also used a bit of Gaussian Blur effect to smooth everything out.




Then I added some highlights and there you have it!
I hope that made sense/helped! Ill definitely try and flush out more things the next time I do one of these tutorials.

Andy Hull

In keeping with the trend of all the portraits I've been doing, I decided to add another musically inspired one to the mix with a portrait of Andy Hull from Manchester Orchestra.
Graphite with a digital finish. For this image I will be posting a full on process of the steps I took digitally and traditionally in the next few days, so check it out if you get the chance.

quick update

Lately I've been making myself busy with promotion, promotion, promotion. I've been sending out emails, postcards, handmade mailers, and whatever I can get my hands dirty with. This week on wednesday I had a portfolio review with the awesome senior art director of Rolling Stone Magazine, Steven Charny. He had a lot of great things to say, which was really encouraging coming from him. I was inspired this weekend to start on a music-related illustration, which ill probably get around to finishing in the upcoming weeks.
in the mean time, here are some sketches i put up on my twitter earlier in the past couple weeks, along with some shoes i just made:

Sylvia Plath

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am."

So for an assignment I had to draw a portrait of a writer, and since I just finished The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath seemed like an obvious choice. I wanted the image to feel pretty dreamy and fit in with her works as a writer. I thought surrounding her with dandelions and poppies was a good option. There was a total of maybe 5 different pictures of her I could find, so i ended up posing for the reference shot myself, with my own lighting, and then working her features onto my face, trying to make her not look like a dude.
I ended up completing this piece, start to finish, in 5 days which I was actually pretty surprised about.
20" x 11" graphite on Stonehenge