If you haven't yet read part one of this digital painting walk-along, you are apt to be a little lost walking into this article. In that post, I covered the beginning half of my five-day production of "Halo". Now I'll be wrapping up this walk-along and giving some final notes on the project as a whole.
Some Housekeeping
The number of layers I was working with in this project grew tremendously—I hadn't previously worked on any painting with so many layers—, so I felt the need to group my layers. Unlike with the individual layers, I find it valuable to descriptively name the layer groups.
As you can see, I didn't get really specific with the names of the layer groups, because I didn't really see the point.
Color Corrections
I wouldn't be surprised if it took you a moment to notice the difference between this screenshot and the last; I really didn't make many changes. All that changed was the value of the canvas and the addition of the purple area under the flashlight. I was still attempting to get the lighting there as close as possible to the photograph, which proved to be quite a challenge.
Through some more of the overlay layers and reduced transparency, I made some shifts in the colors on the plexiglas and changed the halo some more. It became bluer and actually gained a reflected lighter area on the canvas beneath it. Otherwise, though, this was another rather uneventful iteration.
Zoom In
At this point I decided to focus on the gunk on the plexiglas. To get better detail control, I increased the resolution of my canvas to 300ppi. Unfortunately, this has made the PSD file very, very large which could have some negative effects on me in the near future.
I used come cloud filters (Filter>Render>Clouds) and brushing around with high levels of scattering to create the dusty feel of the plexiglas, and so far that was working out. After briefly attempting to draw in the scratches with the hard round brush, I moved on to using a dual-brush setting with Photoshop's default grass blade brush. I was pleased with how that was working out, but at the time this screenshot was taken, it's not finished just yet.
I spent a lot of time painting in with the grass brush and then masking it out, but eventually I got to a point where it looked like a scratched up and dusty sheet of plexiglas, and I could move on to another thing. The only bad thing so far was that the plexiglas was too blue compared to the photograph, so I knew I would have to tone down the color, which could be a challenge.
As I wrapped up the dust and scratches work, I noticed that the PSD was getting very heavy. Almost 50 layers at 2400 by 1800 pixels made for a nearly 130MB file, and on the midrange computers in this lab, it would take about 30 seconds to save my document. I was a little worried about having to split up my files in order to make the big one smaller, but fortunately I didn't experience substantial lag problems with the brushes as I finished up the painting.
More Color Corrections
As you might be able to tell at this point, most of the time spent on a painting like this is spent on getting the colors right. It takes quite a while, and can be compounded for all sorts of reasons, like changing light levels in the lab or changing viewing angles of the monitor on which the photo is being displayed.
First step was painting a brownish color over the part of the plexiglas that needed a color change. In this screenshot, it was way too high opacity, but I needed to be able to see what I was working with at the beginning.
Then I Gaussian-blurred the layer and erased out the parts that strayed over the edges of the plexiglas. This left me with a smoother transition between the central area, which was already the right level of blueness, and the rest of the plate which needed to be browner. Last, I dropped it down in opacity until it matched with the colors at the edges of the photo.
The only thing left to do was correct the middle area of the plexiglas plate, which was lighter than the edges. I duplicated the previous layer, adjusted the opacity, then erased the parts of it that were over the darker edge spots on the plexiglas.
As an aside, while working it's important to look at the painting without the outlines every once in a while. You might find that you have overlooked an area, and since you are most likely going to have the guidelines off in the final work, it's best to catch those mistakes as early as possible.
Flashlight
While I was focusing on the plexiglas, I neglected the flashlight, and when I came back to it, the colors were still off when compared to the photograph. In this revision, I pulled in some blacks and purples on lowered opacity and overlay layers, and I felt that the flashlight's color was much improved.
I also finally brought the wristband hanging from the top of the flashlight into its own layer. Previously, it had been on the bottom layers and was slowly getting painted over with my frequent work on the plexiglas plate and the halo light. The way that the metal clip near the top of the wristband turned out in just a few simple strokes surprised me, as I had originally expected to have to do it twice to get the right feel.
Omissions
One of the things that happens when I'm working on art sometimes is that I will find a part of what I am looking at is rather difficult to bring into the painting and serves little purpose in the work. This happened with the blue wire behind the flashlight in this work. It wasn't intended to be in the photo, and was barely visible as is. Painting it into the work proved frustrating, and so I ultimately decided to leave it out and painted over it with the same colors of the table around it.
Final Touch-Ups
By the time I had finished with the wire, I was ready to put this painting down. I made some final changes to the colors and the lighting underneath the flashlight and finished with the piece.
Concluding Thoughts
Thank you all for reading this walk-along tutorial, and I hope it has given you something to think about when creating your own digital paintings. While I would not consider this one of the best works I have done, I am satisfied with the result of "Halo".
Ultimately my choice of color palettes and the use of the dinged up piece of plexiglas proved to be real stumbling blocks in this painting, and might have prevented me from spending my time on more interesting parts of the piece, like the halo itself.