Patrick Benjamin – Vector Genius Photoshop Tutorial – June 2012
This was an environment concept illustration I did to help me piece together some of the locales in a comic book project I’m working on. This particular thing is a gratuitously-armed water-bound fortress for coastal defense.
Step 1
I first drew out the whole thing in pencil, working out my shapes from my imagination and a collection of reference of various stuff from WW1 and WW2 – concrete bunkers, field fortifications, flakturms, etc. This took me a couple hours of diddling around until I had the kind of look I was going for – big and menacing. Then I went over the whole thing with a ballpoint pen to get my lines in nice and tight.
With this sort of illustration, I know it’s the drawing that’s going to be doing most of the heavy lifting, so I have to make sure I get that right before I move on to anything else.
Step 2
After getting it scanned in, I started blocking in the large sections of color with the pen tool in photoshop. My initial colors are always super garish so I can keep them separated more easily.
After I get all that done, I start fiddling. I like starting my colors this way, because I can quickly change whole areas just by double-clicking the layer and fooling with the color picker until I find a basic scheme that works.
Step 3
Then comes the ‘stuff’ – I paint in some sky smudginess, aerial debris, etc, and throw some texture on top of the fortress itself to give it more ‘grit’.
After that, I start fiddling with adjustment layers to non-destructively edit the whole thing until I get a tighter color scheme going on. At this point, it’s starting to look kind of fearsome!
Step 4
Next is all of the optical effects, both in front…
…and behind. The glow and lens flare bits are stuff I hand-paint in there.
Finished!
A few more final touches in the form of a color balance adjustment layer and some additional painted bits, and we are set!
This should be appearing somewhere inside of my comic book project when I wrap it all up in a year or so 
Patrick Benjamin is a professional illustration enthusiast who persists on a diet of charcoal and sunlight. www.tetchist.com
