A tutorial on my usual methods.

My first obvious step is to actually draw what I want. I use printer paper and a 0.5 mechanical pencil. I'm cheap. Then I throw it in the 'ol scanner and put it into Photoshop 7.0

Now I probably could work straight from this, but for the sake of my eyes, I like to darken the image with the Image->Adjustments ->Auto-Contrast. I also adjust the levels with Image->Adjustments->Levels. Slide the right slider around till you get rid of most of the grey stuff. Oh, and make sure you have your image mode set to RGB for the rest of your session. That's at Image->Mode. When done with that you should have something darker to work with.

From here I use Select->Color Range... and set the fuzziness to max. Make sure the black is selected. Once this is done, just copy and paste. This will make a new layer above the old one where the line art doesn't have white in it. Check to see if it copied well, then delete the old background layer. Then I set the blending options by double clicking on the layer and choose a red color overlay.

Now I creat a new layer with Layer->New. Then I set my brush tool to a full opacity full fill sharp brush of about 5 or 9 pixels. Depends on how thick I want my inking lines. Then I grab the oh-so usefull pen tool and start drawing lines on the new layer. The pen tool is kinda funky, but cool once you figure it out. You can do either point to to point lines, or click and drag to make curves. I suggest consulting the Photoshop help file on how to use it. Make sure you have it set to "paths," the button is at the top of the screen. Everytime I complete a path, I right click and select "stroke." This draws the path with the brush tool I had selected previously. Make sure the foreground color is black. This is a long and tedious process, but the rewards are worth it.

You can touch up any mistakes with the brush and eraser tools if you must. From here I discard the the line art completely and work from this layer. First create another layer and put it under the inking layer. Then go back to the inking layer and select regions that will be the same color with the magic select tool. Then use Select->Modify->Expand to expand the selection by 2 or 3 pixels, depending on how thick your inking is. Now go back to the new layer. Select the paint bucket, a color, and fill the selection. Repeat this process for all the colors and touch up any missed spots with the brush tool on the color base layer.

Now it looks like we have an actual pic. Now comes the trickier parts. On the base color layer, click the magic select tool on the empty background. Then choose Select->Inverse. This will select all your coloring. Create a new layer between the two current ones. Then select Layer->Add Layer Mask->Reveal Selection. This creats a mask on the new layer. This way nothing will show outside of the color itself, and you can be a bit sloppier with the airbrush tool. You can duplicate this layer if you want to do shading and highlights on different layers. From here I use various methods to shade and highlight. For this particular pic, I used the pen tool again for the latex. Insted of selecting "stroke path" though, I choose "fill path" and fill the shapes I make with white with a 5 pixel feather. I then smudged to get the creases. For the purple part, I just airbrushed and smudged. While doing this I often mess with the layer settings to get the right look. Just play around with the different opacities and blending methods.

I used an airbrush on a different layer for the shading on the suit.

For fur I often will make a whole new layer and shade it. I then add noise from the Filters menu and then smudge it with a light brush to copy the effect of hairs.

For hair I use the magic select tool on the base color layer and copy the hair to a new layer. Add a mask like previously. From here I just add some shading and then smudge like crazy. Keep smudging till it looks good. Use various brushes.

I like to make my eyes on a new layer under the base color layer. Using the magic select tool once again on the base color layer, I make a mask that only shows the eyesockets. I then disable this mask. I like creating eyeballs with several circles stacked over each other. I add some noise to the white part as well. If the eyes are rather large, I make an eyeball using the above method, but then I use the Liquify filter to shrink the pupil down and streak the noise. I then use a 3D render to make a sphere and point it in the direction I want. Once all is poisitioned right, and possibly highlighted, enable the layer mask.

Make a background. I'm not very good at that, so use your imagination. Don't forget a shawdow.

Add in some copyright text, and save it for web. And walla, I have finished a whole pic. I've gotten it down that I can go from sketching to final product in about 6 hours. It really all depends on how much detail I want.

All material within this site is copyright to either the respective artists or Ralter (Roy Walter). Don't go jacking the art or I may just have to hunt you down and sign you up for a suscription to Martha Stewart Living.