Isra's sketchbook

[Piotr Jasielski]

Thanks for the help guys!

Of course I don't mind! I appreciate you took your time for it! It looks good indeed, too many blurred areas for my taste to be honest though hehe. I'm just wondering, did you use photo textures or brushes? Because as much as possible I'm avoiding textures because first I want to be able to paint with only brushes (I used textures in the past and got good results bud felt like I wasn't learning well), let me know please.

I'm glad You like it!

I quite like the bluryness and softness of illustrations, but, unfortunately I tend to to over do it pretty often. That's one of many things I need to work at.

As for your question. It's a little bit hard to explain actually. I'm not sure if I provide a good explanation, but I'll try. I regret not saving layers for this one, but if i find some time I'll probably use this method on something similar soon and compile stages in one image.

I used a method i invented myself a while ago, which was inspired by Feng Zhu's method of using photo scraps as a palette (that one in "Smoking Bug" episode). I took 2 random fragments of 2 photos. Firstly I reduced the contrast of your image and made it a little brighter (IIRC)then I placed one fragment of a photo on a multiply layer. On the same multiply layer I employed the clone tool (I used Gimp, clone tool works a little different than in photoshop) to just create a random variety of colors and values over the first layer. The layer itself didn't make any sense, but it's purpose was to, as Feng says "give it some teeth". I could actually just use one color to overlay the image, but I prefer this method becouse it provides a slight variety of colors and values meaning it doesn't look like painted plastic but a bit more realistic (of course it can be done without using photos, but it's a great time-saver).

After that I created an overlay layer and placed a photo scrap on it, then used the clone tool the same way as before. The purpose was to get a color I wanted which was this copper/bronze (or whatever it is called in english) one. I'm not sure what level of opacity it was, just went whith what seemed to be closest to what I wanted.

Lastly I merged all layers and started to refine it. This phase was by far the longest one because the image was very messy from the randomnes created by this overlayed chaos.

I don't think I used any custom brushes. When I wanted to save the texture (created by previous actions) I used multiply (to create shadow) or soft light (to make it brighter) [everything on one layer, just brush mode]. Most of the time, though, it was just a soft round brush with low opacity. To make some more texture I used a very small brush in soft light mode (bright and dark).

If I did it in photoshop I'd propably rely more on custom brushes, but those in Gimp suck, so it's definitely better to just utilize some photo-randomnes.

I hope I didn't mess up my explanation too much. :)