Monday, August 28, 2006

The Walls of the Tomb

I'm back... Sorry for the delay in getting more mordacious goodies up for you to enjoy (I hope you enjoy them anyway!) I was searching for some good photos to use for testing purposes here at my job, and I stumbled upon a photo taken in a tomb, somewhere in Italy I believe. I loved the details and the textures, so I thought I would take a stab at painting it in Photoshop. This is the result. Process? I had the original photo open in a photshop window. I then opened a new photoshop document, and created a new layer on top of the background layer. I filled the background layer with what I felt was the dominant midtone color, in this case the yellow midtone. I then started sketching on the new layer I had created with a light grey, using the brush tool. Once I had roughed out and blocked in the skulls and the background walls, I started to build up the tones, I started on the left skull first, and continued building the tones, then finally finishing with the darkest darks. Most of the time, I was using a fairly large brush with the opacity set very low, then gradually darkening until I was happy with the blend. This was the process for this entire piece. I spent more time on this than I thought I would, due largely to the fact that my hard drive died on my trusty PowerBook G4. I am really pleased with the end result here, I like the mix of soft and hard edges, and since I am a sucker for skulls, this one just worked all the way around for me. A good start to the rapidly approaching Fall/Halloween season. As much as I have been loving painting with Photoshop, I am going to give it a rest for a while as I learn the fine art of working Painter. More to come...stay tuned!!

7 comments:

Urban Barbarian said...

Spooky! You did a helluva job with it! NICE!

Kevin Keele said...

ooh. This is cool, dude!

Unknown said...

very well done! Thanks for the insight to the process. Painter is one Id like to learn one day.

Cant wait to see the next round of Patrick slickness!

Tyler Stott said...

i eant to seee more!!! get the pencill out!! hahah

scottra said...

Wow, that is really nice. I'm usually not a fan of the photoshop stuff, just because the filters usualy cheapen art (in my opinion) but this is fantastic.

Keep it up!

R

Andrew Glazebrook said...

N i c e !!!!!!

Unknown said...

Absolutely cool!