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Digital Painting: One Technique
I've had good and bad pages in the comic, but when stuff comes together well, it's a great feeling. Page 93 was one of those pages. So, I thought I'd do up a tutorial outlining how I got to the final image. It was a good learning process for me, and I hope it's helpful to all of you.
Before you start, make sure that you understand how Layers work in Photoshop. You need to know how Layers, Layer Modes and Layer Opacity works otherwise the techniques below won't help you much.
1) First thing, I did research... I'd never done underwater stuff before, so it was time to learn what it looked like. Whenever I'm not absolutely sure of something, I try to dig up some reference. It's not about copying, but more about understanding what you're trying to represent and seeing trends in it.
Google is great for this. I searched for "clothed underwater" on Google's web and image search and gathered about 30 pictures showing how clothes look underwater, as well as giving me ideas on bubble patterns.
2) From there, I drew the line art, trying to incorporate what I had seen, but not copying:
 Line Art Scanned In I figured that the back leg and arm would be blurred out or obscured with bubbles, so there would be no point in painstakingly drawing it if it would just get wiped out. 3) Because I do the pages in monochromatic tones (one-color), I tend to do them as greyscale images and add a Color Mode Layer to "dye" everything beneath it. That allows me to vastly change that overall color without screwing with each layer. 4) I dropped in a mid-tone of medium to dark grey on Multiply. This gives me a solid basis to build shadows down from and build highlights up from. I almost always use a mid-tone, but in this case it was especially dark because I knew that the final image would be a dark underwater scene.
 Dark Grey Layer on Multiply used for a Base Tone 5) I added Shadows with Layers on Multiply, trying to keep in mind where my light source was and what effect I wanted. I also added in the blue Color Layer, so I could see what it would look like finished, even though I was still working in greys underneath.
 Various Layers On Multiply for shadows 6) The water effects are done with areas highlighted with the Polygonal Lasso colored dark, and then Gaussian or Motion blurred. Then, I lowered the Layer Opacity of the layers to make them more transparent. It's easier to paint darker and lower the Opacity I find then to paint them mid tones and possibly wish they were darker later. 7) The most important step for high contrast lighting like this is the highlights. The shadow layers are done with Multiply, but the highlights are various Layers done on Normal mode, sitting on top of the Shadow layers. I picked out areas with the Polygonal Lasso and swept my brush over them to create Gradients, rather than using the clunky Gradient Fill Tool. Once again, Layer Opacity is your friend here... I painted really heavy white and used Opacity to tone it down to the level I wanted. That way, I could always up the intensity of it without re-painting areas. The more Layers you can handle, the more control of individual areas you can get. These highlights are spread out over 6 layers:
 Various Layers on Normal for highlights 8) Now for the crazy part, the bubbles. 5 layers of various circular blobs, motion blurred streaks and speckled bubble trails, all on Normal mode sitting over top of the other highlights. Some of the layers are above the Line Art layer, so that they overlap it (check the bubbles from his mouth for this sort of thing)
 Bubble and blurred streak layers added in: finished It wasn't exactly this simple a progression. I went back to add more Shadow layers several times and went back and forth quite a bit to get the right effect. Still, these "steps" should be helpful for a start anyways. *whew* I'm typing a novel here... anyways, that's the stuff. Questions or comments? Feel free to E-Mail me.
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