Haus der Luege : Noli Evocare Quod Reprimere Non Potes

Given time, I can draw well enough. But it’s not the fun part - I like painting a lot better. Sometime in my 20’s I got a bit damaged and developed some fine-motor control issues which made drawing and painting all the more challenging. Frankly, I’m a bit lazy, and there just wasn’t enough motivation for me to redevelop the skill in the real world, when I was using computers to do a lot of my work anyhow. So, I started doing it digitally, where there’s no such thing as a fatal mistake, but plenty of easy ways to make bad art and cheat. I dislike cheating at anything , so I evolved this process, which let’s me claim pretty legitimately that I “done gone and made a pretty.”

I recently got an iPad and frankly, this technique is so suited to the device that I couldn’t resist banging one out. This tutorial will take you through creating a “sketch” from the photo all the way to a finished product, using Photoshop CS and ArtStudio.

It’s a sort of paining-by-numbers method, but it takes a lot of practice and a fair amount of skill to do well.

I started in Photoshop, since I hadn’t learned ArtStudio well enough to pull this off. It has most of the tools but lacks the convenient filters to get you started quickly. Let’s get started.

Creating the sketch from a photo

1. Make a copy of your original file and title it something like “sketch”
   
   
2. Open Photoshop and the image you wish to work with. We’re going to use several filters to make a “sketch”.
3. Start by running “Find Edges” Play with the settings until you get a good basic level of detail.
   
   
4. Use the Brightness and contrast to take out all the unnecessary detail.
   
   
5. You’ll probably want to do this a few times, in stages, rather than brutalize the image all at once.
   
   
6. Apply the “Cutout” filter. This gives you relatively clean set of lines to work with.
   
   
7. “Desaturate” the image to make it black and white. If you like what you have, you can stop here. Save the file when you’re satisfied.
   
   
8. If you want heavier or different lines, there are a ton of filters under the Sketch settings that you can use to square up the values to what you prefer to work with. I used the "Dark Lines" filter.
   
   

Practice this and you’ll be able to know out a sketch in 10 minutes.

Creating your starting palette

Trying to recreate the photo in full color is just plain nuts. The trick to painting is to reduce your color set to a workable level, and work with those few colors. The hard part is figuring out which colors to use. So, let Photoshop figure it out for you.

1. Create a new document big enough to use as a palette to store the colors you end up with. Make sure it’s large enough that you have room to mix colors later. I like 512x512px. you may want larger or smaller.
2. Open the original photo. Choose the “Posterize” item from the Adjustments menu. Choose a level that gets enough of the critical color values to work with, but not an overwhelming number. I like to use between 7 & 10 as my setting, and then pick the ones that will be most useful.
   
   
3. “Posterize” does odd things and makes odd choices sometimes. Adjust the color using your best kung-fu until you get something you like. I tend to like using “edit>Adjustments>Variations” to do this.
   
   
4. Sample the lightest color and using a ~150px pencil tool, drop it onto your palette image do the same for the darkest color.
5. Choose 3-5 more colors to sample, and do the same. You’ll use these to block in the major areas, and then mix them to get more colors. The object is to establish a palette to work with, not to get all the most perfect and realistic colors.
   Here's the starting palette for this project:
   
   
6. Save the palette file.

Transfer stuff to iPad.

I uploaded the original, the palette and the sketch to convenient web server. You can also add them to iPhoto if you’re on a Mac, and move them over that way.

Working on the painting

If you’re working on an iPad, your painting app may let you setup a palette for a specific project. If it does, open up the palette file and sample the colors to add them to the project palette. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to swap back and forth a lot.

Start painting. This is technique and voodoo. It takes larnin’ and practice. Have fun! I’m not touching it.

Many hours later…

You now have a painting. Take it back into Photoshop and see what need tocuh ups and changes. I inevitably end up rotating colors and doing a number of overlays to alter the palette to something I’m more happy with.

Thanks and props to the original photographer for an awesome picture.

Larger version of the finished product is available here