Post #1

Greeting and salutations! In this first post I'll try to get a feel for what can be done here. Can I attach a PSD? It seems so!

"Generic Gun Girl"

This is a random piece that I made in 2020. It shows a bit how I work in Photoshop (this is all digital, but sometimes the first sketch is a pencil thumbnail). I start with a rough sketch for feel the shapes out. Next I fade the sketch a bit and refine the lines, work out details. But it's still to rough, so I repeat that process. I use a colour mode brush on the lines, warms on the face and ground, blues on top of shapes and metals and backgrounds. Usually it still looks a bit muddy with a colour layer on top, so I add a Color Balance adjustment layer with individual values for the Shadows (purple), Midtones (red-orange) and Highlights (yellow). 

The flat colour layer is multiply mode. I sparingly plop some mud and highlights on it. Also note that it's not fully opaque, but around 60%. This makes the lines come though, gives it a sort of water colour look which helps when the background is white. It also brings colours closer together towards a gray which helps to homogenize them. I can be a bit sloppy picking colours and at 100% opacity it can begin to clash.

Transparent colours failing to "pop" can be addressed by little accents of wild colours in the line-art layer, usually on the terminator (between shadow and light/paper-white). A little terminator saturation can rub off on shadow & light.

In this case I also used a gradient on top of everything to liven up the flats a bit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

My brush is nothing special, but I'll see if I can figure out where Photoshop (CS5.1) stored it and post it later. That's all for now. Let me know if you have any questions.