Painting In Photoshop

This time in Elements of Design we still stuck to using photoshop, but did something unlike other projects. Here we were tasked with painting in it and having the final result be purely by our own hand. What we would do is take a photo or picture from the internet and trace it followed by painting over it making it look semi real with a couple tools associated with the exercise.

For my project I made a painting of the Iron Giant, who is very geometric in shape, this translated to some areas of the project being extremely easy and others being tedious, time consuming, and generally a bad experience. On his chest piece and head there were large sections of monotone plating that only required to be filled in with a respective color, doing this covered nearly half of the image and took probably a fiftieth of the time securing its spot as the easiest part of the project by far. By contrast his neck, upper chest, and hand all were made up of small segments that had to be individually colored, blended, shaded, and more. Every piece took a similar amount of time regardless of size so this part ate up almost the entire project duration and most of my attention making it easily the hardest part.  

No work I did this year has been perfect and I don’t think anyone can say differently regarding any work, this implies that different parts of the work can be improved. One thing that falls into this category is my blending job between like and contrasting colors on the body. The background I used left, wherever blending occurred, a blueish tinge that doesn't belong. On the other end of the spectrum what ended up being a stronger aspect was at some points creating a seamless edge between color contrasts without shading that made the area look less like a cartoon.

The objective of the assignment was to use the brush tool, including the mixer brush tool, and the pencil tool,  along with the other tools we learned to use in the past to take the original photo, transfer its colors, and give it a sense of realness and the aspects of a painting. In my project I use the pencil and brush tool extensively in first tracing the original image and then to get all of the colors of the original onto the new work. After this I used the mixer brush tool to take all of the rough lines caused by the trace and make an appeasing gradient between contrasts. After doing all that the project was completed and looking back there are a few things I would change. For one I definitely would have chosen a more organic subject to paint. There were very little to no gradual color changes in the original that makes a subject look real and it was hard to create these in the product. However, all the same i’m not disappointed with how everything turned out in the end.