We draw a colorful illustration in Photoshop. I want to be an illustrator. If you want, draw an illustration for

French artist Xavier Collet explains how to make the painting process more effective using his work with a dark fairy surrounded by a forest.

I think the following drawing rules can help you develop your skills, but sometimes it can feel like they are trying to limit you. When trying to satisfy a wide range of artistic criteria - such as character design, thoughtful compositions and effective color schemes - you can slow down, but fast work is not always good, remember that.

I believe that the best way to the top is to learn to feel, to do things instinctively. With practice, seeing the things that are in the image and identifying those elements that still need work becomes second nature, filling the subconscious as you work.

With practice, it becomes second nature to see things that need improvement.

The only thing I did before I started drawing was to step away from everyone and the photos in my head so that my subconscious could start generating ideas. After that, I completely immersed myself in the drawing process.

Initial sketches

I don't know how far I'll go with this illustration. But I know that I want it main character was a queen of sorts—someone who would make you feel afraid, uneasy, when you looked into her eyes.

So I'll start with a rough sketch to get an idea of what the composition will be like. She walks in the forest and watches you. Well, let's start drawing someone who will make you feel real fear and mesmerizing horror.

Fifty Shades of Gray

It is important to take into account the depth of the image and decide on the planes: a background with two or three levels of depth; your character's main plane and foreground.

I start in mono - it's faster and it will be easier to change something. I chose a palette of many shades of gray and by adding horns and a full length dress to the character, I began to define her character.

Starting point

We all have our little weaknesses. Mine is that I can't resist drawing the character's face in the early stages. It is often said that detailing elements in isolation is not a good practice because you end up missing the big picture.

Helpful advice, no doubt, but I can't stand the fact that there will be only a few details on the face, I'm terribly itching to add them. So I took a little time to draw the face, crown, horns and hair.

Sometimes it is very difficult to determine what colors the illustration will be in. So here's a little advice for you. Take an old drawing or even a photograph, it doesn't matter. Duplicate the image layer and apply the Gaussian Blur effect to the duplicate. Then change Blending Options – Blend Mode – Overlay. And see if this color scheme inspires you for your work illustration.

Search for a color theme

After that, I adjusted the Hue/Saturation and painted with the brush in color mode. Another tip is to apply Auto Levels or Auto Contrast and then play around with the layer blending modes. Sometimes happy accidents will inspire you and help you overcome the wall of “uncreativity.”

Add details

I start drawing out the details of the character, starting with the head and bust, before moving on to designing the clothing.

I'm not doing any dress ideas like I said, I'm just flipping through a large selection of different images to get my creative juices flowing so I can come up with ideas unusual design for a dress.

Contrast

It's good if there is contrast in the drawing. More specifically: the contrast of shapes, brightness and color. My choice for this illustration is a bluish light which will indicate magical power and control over all living beings in this illustration.

More details

Now that I'm happy with the colors I've chosen, I can finalize her costume by adding details like jewelry, and introduce a range of materials like fur, leather, metal, and glitter that all add up to make the design more interesting.

Plastic surgery is your friend

Remember the benefits of digital graphics programs. Photoshop's Plastic filter is a powerful editorial option. Here in my illustration I use it to touch up the fairy's face since I decided it was too long.

Let's finish with her

Time to complete the final details of the character. I added the finishing touches to her corset, painted a skull on her staff, added a blue glow to her costume, etc.

Now it's time to spice up the background with some light and some noise. The speckled brushes in the Foundation Lightening mode are perfect for me.

We create pets

I want my dark fairy to have...pets. The bottom of the composition is a bit loose, so it's the perfect place to draw the creatures that come to life with her dark magic.

I don't have a clear idea of what I'm going to do, so I sketch it out with a dark brush and then use a brush in the Color Dodge mode to add details like eyes and mouths with wisps of magic coming out of them.

Menagerie of Monsters

So far I'm working instinctively and I'm quite happy with the design of my creature. Now I can add others. I use the same workflow: create a small sketch and then add details using the brush in the base dodge mode.

Blurred elements

I'm almost finished with this illustration and will now be applying some of the tricks I've learned over the years. I want my fairy to look at the observer - the spectator who is hiding in the forest.

So I'll finish off the branches with hard brush strokes. There is no need to draw them in detail. Then I added a Gaussian Blur effect to them and that's it - they're ready!

Grain adds texture

I love adding texture to my drawings. Sometimes it's just a paper texture created using a Layer Overlay. But now I will do something completely different.

I added a neutral gray layer (Saturation - 0, Brightness - 50) and applied Filter>Noise>Add Noise twice (set to maximum) and Filter>Blur>Blur three times. Then I set this layer to Overlay (Overlay) and clicked on the Layer Opacity, setting the settings to 5-6%

More magical life

I decided that the picture needed more life. My solution is to quickly paint the butterflies in the foreground, again giving the drawing more depth.

The final trick

Last tip. An easy way to add a little more variety to your art is to create a new layer and fill it with a soft cloud brush.

Set the base color to a light gray and use a soft cloud brush to create contrast. Then set this layer to Blend Mode.

I followed my own advice and finished the drawing!

In this lesson I will tell and show how to draw a fairy tale with a pencil step by step, how to draw an illustration for a fairy tale. A fairy tale is a fictional story, mostly a fairy tale, so often in the illustration of fairy tales there are fairy-tale characters, either non-existent, or animals that can talk, or all together and many other options.

So, there is a text in the fairy tale, we need to find any episode from this text at your discretion and draw it. You can see examples of illustrations for various Soviet fairy tales from cartoons and simply, I will give links below.

We will have a fairy tale about a bear cub, there are many fairy tales about bears, but this illustration will be for a non-existent fairy tale, for example, there will be such a thing that the bear cub ran far away to catch her, she was very beautiful, but did not notice how she ran far away from the house and ran to the river. The little bear had never seen the river, he was delighted with its beauty and there were beautiful flowers growing next to it, which he really liked, he picked one and ran home across the field to tell mom and dad about what he had lost. We will illustrate this moment, when he runs across the field with a flower in his hand.

You can start drawing from nature, or from the character itself, whatever suits you. First you need to make several sketches of the character, in our case it is a bear girl and select one of them. Now you need to depict the selected character in motion. So let's start drawing. Draw a teddy bear in the middle just above the bottom of the edge of the sheet.

Let's draw a circle and auxiliary lines for the middle of the head and the location of the eyes. Our head is turned 3/4, draw the shape of the head and ears.

Draw the pupils, arms and legs, in the hand.

Draw more vegetation in front of the mountains and part of the path.

We draw a whole range of mountains in the distance, and since this is a fairy tale, the clouds will be in the shape of animals, we draw only their silhouettes so that they are recognizable, these are a turtle, a fish and an elephant.

That's it, the illustration for the fairy tale is ready, all that remains is to color it.

This tutorial will help you learn how to draw a 2D illustration using standard Photoshop brushes. We will go through all the stages of creating an illustration, from sketch to background, gradually working out and drawing all the details. You can successfully apply all these methods to other illustrations, as well as in the design of other types of projects, such as logos, for example - drawing and painting skills always come in handy. The author used Photoshop CS3 and Wacom Graphire 3 to create this illustration.

1. Sketch

I started with a sketch. Having decided on the forms, I paid attention color scheme, highlighting the main and background colors. To do this, try to imagine the picture as accurately as possible. I sketched out some color spots on a blank sheet of Photoshop. I don’t like working on a flat filled canvas—color transitions help give the right mood to the work. I added a general background fill. You see, there is a lot of green grass - the good old song comes to mind about “...we dream of grass, grass near the house...” Try to imagine yourself in such a place: next to the house grows that oak tree that you often climbed as a child ...

2. Customizing brushes

We will add details using a brush. In this illustration I'm using only standard Photoshop brushes. If you want, you can download others and work with them. Let's set them up for work. Here are the brushes I will use:

3. Color selection

Let's determine the main colors we will work with. Here is my palette for this illustration. As usual, I want to draw something brighter. For the background I chose shades of yellow and blue. The remaining colors are for the landscape. Save your palette as a separate file. And while you draw, keep it open at hand.

4. We work on objects

I decided to remove the old car that was originally parked near the house. She doesn't look that good there. The car is an optional object in this illustration. So, I erased the car and drew my oak tree - and maybe you can draw another tree. To do this, I applied the main spots of paint with a hard round brush, and then schematically drew the details with the same brush, but smaller. You also need to create a separate layer for the grass and draw it in general terms as well.

5. Meadow

We continue to draw the grass in more detail, using both a small hard brush and smoothing out the transitions with a soft one. Later I can change the grass, add flowers - red, blue or yellow. I'm not thinking about it yet, but the green grass will definitely come in handy in this illustration.

6. Working with the palette

When choosing a color, I usually do this:

7. Wood

Watch how I paint wooden fence boards. In this lesson I do not draw different types of wood, there are only 2 types - for the door and for the fence.

8. Canvas size

To draw details well, you need a large canvas. If you see that the size you have chosen is clearly not enough, at this stage you can still increase it. For our work we need a canvas of at least 2000 or 2600 pixels.

9. Drawing with a small brush

Draw the details with a small brush. Take a look at how I work with the roof detailing:

10. Grass

Now I'll create a couple more new grass layers. I fill the areas again with the main color and then work in the shadows with shades of it. I also paint bunches of grass blades in separate layers. Why draw grass in different layers? To make it easier to make changes that you later have to make. It is much easier to correct mistakes if the main elements of the work are in separate layers. In addition, somewhere you can save time and effort by duplicating successful layers with blades of grass in different places work.
How to draw grass, you ask? Just take a brush, pick up some color, and paint a blade of grass. Then change the color and draw the next one, just like in my example. And so many times.

11. Clouds

It's time to start detailing the clouds. To draw the cloud, I outlined its shape on a separate layer and then set the layer to overlay to achieve the effect you see in this picture.
My sky consists of two layers: one contains the main colors, and the other contains all the bright places and gaps. Try to achieve harmony by changing the shape of the brush and painting the clouds with different strokes.

We need to set shadows and light. If in doubt, look at pictures of clouds. Check Google to check different types and cloud shapes.

12. Clouds

I also want to add bright sun rays and gaps in the clouds, reminiscent of lightning. After going through several options, I settled on the following. The light spots are still pretty rough for now, but I'll finish with them later. I note that each of the elements is on a separate layer, which allowed me to quickly select them and easily carry out all the manipulations with shades, brightness, etc. : Ctrl + click on the desired object selects the corresponding layer, and Ctrl + click on the preview of this layer in the layers panel gives us a selection in the form of a layer object.

13. Adjustments Settings

That's what really matters. By choosing the appropriate shade, you can change the entire atmosphere of the illustration. Now I change the colors in Color Balance. Then I'll adjust the brightness and contrast. As you can see, the result is obvious.

13. Let's summarize

Merge all layers into one. You can add the finishing touch by applying the Smart Sharpen filter to the resulting image to sharpen the details. This helps a lot in bringing out small details like highlights.
Time to close Photoshop I hope you enjoyed it!

This lesson was translated for you by Hatice Bayramoglu. We will be glad if you dare to show off your results)) Good luck in your studies!

Comments

DeVeL
December 9, 2011 at 6:20 pm
Somehow not quite a lesson. Rather just making of, and not the most detailed one.
Islam
December 17, 2011 at 6:53 pm
But I think it can still be called a lesson, just follow the logic and everything will be ok.))
Vladislav
March 25, 2015 at 4:53 pm
I am a project manager at the Children and Parents Against Cancer charity foundation. www.deti-lipetska.ru
Our foundation is starting to publish a newspaper where I want to publish my fairy tale. Here is a link to the first three chapters:
lipetskblog.ru/blogs/blog...ste-glava-tretya
The fairy tale is unusual because it is written for children who have fallen under the heavy millstones of a serious and painful illness. Therefore, the fairy tale is a little sad but with powerful life motivation.

Need illustrations! But since we have a charitable foundation and the newspaper is free, I ask you to show complicity and offer your own illustrations for free. We, in turn, will definitely indicate this in each printed chapter of the fairy tale. Thank you!..

Write to us by email [email protected]
Katya Answer:
November 5, 2018 at 5:52 pm

I can try) =)

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It is very important for any person - an adult and especially a child - that the image is contrasting. How to draw an illustration that attracts attention? The easiest way to check the contrast of an illustration is to run the camera on your phone with a black and white filter and look through it at the image. For example, my octopus is all gray.

This means that in flowers it is gentle and cute, but when a child looks at it, he will quickly get tired, because there is nothing to catch his eye on.
And here the liner comes to the aid of many people. Illustrations with contours highlighted with a liner, at first glance, become completely different - contrasting and beautiful. But through the camera we will see that the illustration merges into one tone, so it will not hold attention for long.

As you paint, I recommend viewing your work through the camera in black and white and discarding the liner, at least until your colors have evened out. Over time, you will begin to see contrast in your illustrations and may or may not want to use liner.

In watercolor it's very cool to leave white outlines. White color works much better as an outline and provides better contrast.

High contrast techniques are especially important to use in illustrations where there is a lot of detail. If such a drawing is not tonally varied, then the child will not be able to look at it for a long time.

Here is an example of a highly detailed illustration with good tonal contrast.

Test yourself, look at your illustrations through a black and white camera and ditch the outline!
When it comes to Wimmelbooks, outline has its place because it adds more contrast and helps to better capture the details in the illustration. But at the same time, through a black and white camera we still clearly see the picture. You need to achieve this.
Bright colors often give a false sense of contrast that is not there.
Give up the outline and learn to draw more contrasting images.
Author.

I have for last days some kind of unprecedented creative and working upsurge. Finally, I like my own work, done both for customers and for stock. Therefore, it is easy to draw and layout, it’s nice and makes me happy.
I want to reveal the secret of the workflow a little. I’ve been thinking about making a video for a long time about how objects are drawn for stock, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet, so I’ll show it only in pictures and words.

Step 1. Choose a topic
Where does the work begin? From choosing a topic. To be honest, I’m not yet particularly sophisticated about trends, choosing niches (maybe that’s why I have modest numbers in my wallet), I draw what I want. I chose a style for myself and called it “multi-realism,” that is, realistic enough to convey volume and shadows, but at the same time leave cartoonish rage and gloss. Currently I am working in the “objects” genre, but later I plan to include people and small stories here.

I am never faced with the question “What to draw”, rather “What to draw first”. I am impressed by absolutely everything: food in cafes, store windows, beautiful photographs of people, works of other authors. Fortunately, I don’t have to sit at the monitor, dragging different flowers back and forth in the hope that something decent will come out. I completely abandoned creating backgrounds, textures, business cards and other things that were quite popular among other stockers. It just didn’t work out, I didn’t enjoy the process of making them, and accordingly they didn’t sell at all.
When I sit down at the computer, I always already have an idea of what I want to see as a result, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

So, choosing a topic. I always and everywhere carry a diary with me, which, by the way, also really puts me in a creative mood. And as soon as an idea comes to my mind, I add it to the Mind Map. I won’t go into detail about what it is, this information can easily be Googled, I’ll just clarify that the method is really cool. Allows you to structure ideas without squeezing them into a framework, allowing the development of one thought indefinitely.
This is what my cards usually look like.
Ideas are written down on a web, then thought about and analyzed. Something is postponed, and something gets life in the second stage.

Stage 2. Sketches
Everything here is extremely simple and clear; if I choose a topic, then I list which items can relate to it. And then I look for pictures of the necessary items and copy them into my moleskine. It is necessary to copy, stock photos do not allow you to use other people’s photographs as direct references (redrawing of other people’s photos), but if you select several pictures, take something from one, something from another and eventually get your own drawing, then everything is fine, the author’s the right was not affected.
To be honest, I draw so-so, my hand is not focused on creating straight lines, but this is not particularly necessary, which is why I love vector.
The sketches here serve as approximate schematic sketches, from which I will take general shape. Illustrator tools that allow you to draw even circles and rectangles will later save you from crooked lines.

Stage 3. How do others do it?
For myself, I have established the basic principle of working with stock: my pictures should be no worse in quality than those presented on the first pages of popular ones. If the work is not up to par, I will tinker with it until I am satisfied with the result. Naturally, here we are talking about works on the same topic and in the same technique as mine.

Yesterday I decided to draw on the theme of Fast Food. Using this search query I found cute sausages in dough, potatoes, cola. I chose what I would buy myself if I had such an order, and simply what pleased the eye. I directly throw the pictures I find onto the sheet where I am going to work. I don’t take anything from them, neither color, nor shape, nor style. I only need a general impression, everything else will come from my sketches and selected palettes.

Stage 4. Preparation of basic forms.
Then work with the computer begins. I have graphics tablet, but I use it extremely rarely, I like to boast that all my works were done with a mouse, which, by the way, is absolutely true. Main tool: pen. Those who understand vectors will understand what the essence is. In short, the pen allows you to draw curved lines of any shape using points and vectors.
With a pen (for objects that require evenness: mugs, plates, boxes - ellipses, rectangles), I outline the main details, paint them in chaotic colors, just to determine the shape.
As a result, you get such unattractive illustrations, but the general idea is already clear, then only complication.

This 5. Color selection.
Color selection is one of the most important moments, which I categorically do not trust myself and do not select colors myself. There are many services that allow you to collect beautiful palettes, but this is not quite the same. The main assistant in color selection was the service: shutterstock.labs. Interesting stuff, I recommend digging around, even just for the sake of general development. The site allows you to select photographs on topics of interest, taking into account your preferred palette. For example, I know that to draw Fast Food I will most likely need yellow, red, orange, brown and their shades. I create a corresponding search query and the program gives me ready-made photographs with the same hot dogs, potatoes, etc., and even in bright, beautiful colors, which I will later use in my work, thanks to the eyedropper tool.

Stage 6. Subject development.
The rough part of the process is completed, let's start creating. For the rendered details, I select colors from found photographs, then add new details: shadows, highlights, light, texture. As a result, I get a set of individual items that can now be assembled.

Stage 7. Composing compositions.
The items are drawn, it's time to think about how to present them. Even during my short stoker activity, I managed to realize that compositions sell better than just items on a white background (although I also upload them in this form and sometimes they buy them). Therefore, now I simply combine our entire collection into different pictures, with backgrounds, without backgrounds, with inscriptions, without them. The more you can create from one collection of pictures, the better. I especially like it when some items can be taken from past works. For example, I added ice cream from the “Summer” collection to the “Fast Food” set. That’s why I try to draw in the same style so that I can combine everything.

This is what my work on pictures looks like. I discovered that such stages left an imprint on my design work, I began to make products of a different style and of much better quality, which is also pleasing.