Thursday 01 Jan 2009
This enabled him to create defined edges and detail, and gave him more control. Hammonds says: “This seems to be quite a popular technique these days, but at the time I’d never heard of it, and it felt like a profound discovery.
“Having finished the underpainting, defining edges and getting the shadows and highlights in place, I added a new layer to colour onto, in which I began painting my elementary flesh tones,” he continues (see the middle image).
Once these were laid down, he mixed in subtle tints of blue, purple, green to give it a more stylized look. “I wanted the two figures to appear hot and flushed, so I made the skin appear shiny by creating concentrated highlights.” (see the lower image).
Hammonds added these highlights in with the Dodge tool, and then switched to the Burn tool to add extra shadows and darker areas. “I could have used the airbrush for this, but liked how Dodge and Burn affected the colours, making them appear more vibrant,” he explains.
“For the hair I laid down large strands, dashed in some light and dark spots before using the smudge technique to finesse them into strands and weave them together.”
Next, he added texture and stubble to the man’s face using a basic stippling technique. With a scatter brush and the Dodge tool, he roughened up the highlights before using the Burn tool to add in small patches of stubble.
Mike Campau
www.seventhstreetstudio.com
Mike Campau is creative director of Michigan-based integrated creative services agency Seventhstreet, whose clients include US car giants Chevrolet and Ford.
Photoshop has been his weapon of choice since 1991, when he first explored version 1.0. Like all the experts interviewed for this feature, he is largely self-taught, “with a few workshops sprinkled in.”
“It was never offered as a class when I was in school, so I spent a lot of late nights in the computer lab playing with Photoshop and collaborating with other artists,” says Campau, who admits that learning Photoshop “is an ongoing process.”
But certain features – particularly layers and the History palette – make this learning process so much more productive, says Campau: “I remember working on the earlier versions of Photoshop with no layers and only one undo, which made it very hard to move quickly, since there was no room for error.
“Now I have more creative freedom, knowing that I can always go back in History, test ideas on a layer and use multiple layers to composite images together. The one piece of advice I always give our interns is don’t be afraid to try anything – there is always Undo.”
Campau recommends that all Photoshop creatives “use channels or Calculations [Image > Calculations] when creating layer masks for organic items and objects with transparency”.
This, he says, creates a ‘truer’ and more refined mask, and gives a more realistic blend between objects.
Feature continues...
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paintings & illustrations, mostly, which i upload to flickr.RT @fragmentedm
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