John Alexander Carvajal – Skateboard Designs – January 2012 – Photoshop Tutorial
John Alexander Carvajal is an artist/illustrator currently living in Sarasota, Florida. His work primarily focuses on a good ink drawing with flat colors in photoshop and additional photoshop “magic”. John enjoys bringing some of the grittier side of things to his projects.
To see more of his work visit – jacarvajal.blogspot.com
Pencil Sketch
1) I always start with a pencil drawing and then ink it with a brush, and touch up the line work in photoshop. On the left skateboard there are two drawings overlaid on one another, that is why you can see some of the line work through some parts.
Ink and Blocking in colors
2)Once my ink drawing is fixed up, and all the lines are clean, I go in and lay down a gradient for the background, it helps set the mood (as well as making it easier to work on than white). for these three I tried keeping the same color scheme at first. At this stage I also lay in flat colors.
Masking and refining Color Scheme
3)This step is where things start getting fun. I create a quick mask on each of the base colors, on this quick mask I start laying down my shadows with a hard brush on the tree boards. The books items on the bottom shelf in the left board were popping out too much so I pushed them back with a gradient. I changed the colors of the octopus on the right board, I felt that the black lines were too intense for him being illuminated.
Highlights and and Final touches
4)On this stage I add another quick mask on the base colors and lay down highlights with a hard brush on the three boards. I throw in some color on the bottom shelf to bring the jar forward a bit. I start messing with the opacity with the color so that it isn’t too saturated. On the right board I add a jagged shape using the polygonal lasso tool. With these shapes I wanted to make it seem as if the octopus looks like it’s being electrocuted. At first I only had the two shapes underneath the octopus, but then added the two radiating shapes to give the idea that the light was traveling through the darkness.
Wow, this is cool. Excellent info, so creative!