Organic digital painting "sphere"

malcon · Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:38 pm Post subject: Organic digital painting "sphere"

here is a simple way to start practicing organic painting in photoshop using greyscale. I have used this same technique on all of my digital paintings.

1. Start with a medium grey as the background color. you can go to edit/fill/ then select 50% grey, or just double click the black brush color and select a grey halfway between the white and the black.

This will the the middle ground for the entire painting.

2. Take the elliptical marquee tool (the top left corner of the tool pallet.)
on your canvas hold shift and click and drag to make a perfect circle on the background.

Create a new layer and name it shadows.

Start to paint using a soft, 5% opacity brush around the bottom of the circle where the shadow would be if it were a sphere... start really light and work big. then as it gets darker work smaller and more detailed. i start with a brush size of around 125.
when your done it should look like this (it should not be totally black anywhere)

3. Create a new layer and name it highlights.

on this layer do the same as you did with the shadow but on the top side of the sphere using white. Add white where the light source would be hitting it . work large and work your way dont to smaller detailed areas (there should not be much detail with a sphere.)

4. Now after this is finished open a new layer and name it shadow and glow. you can add a shadow below the sphere. what i did was use the elliptical marquee tool to create an oval what would be the shadow of the sphere. after you paint the shadow, erase the part of the shadow that you can see over the sphere. ten ad a blur to it. you can use the gaussian blur and mess with the sliders untill you find one you like. the shadow must line up with the light source. for example if the light source is on the right side the shadow cannot be on the right side. once yo have the elliptical marquee selected fill it in with a 5% opacity brush untill it is dark enough to match the shadow on the lower side of the sphere.

also, some things you can do is add a bit of glow around the top of the sphere. this will be the light that is bouncing off the top. also add some highlight to the bottum of the sphere. this is where the light will bounce up from under the sphere . both of these highlights, or glows should be very subtle.

in the end you will end up with somthing like this.

this is a good practice for painting with greyscale starting with a medium color and adding the shadows and highlights on top of that.
i used the same technique to paint the picture of my father.

Patrick · Administrator

Thanks for sharing.

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