Summer Hobby

As we're in our long summer break before our second year of uni we've all been told to pick up and document a hobby.

I have always had a keen interest in illustration and animation, particularly in Japanese animation.
As I am already quite familiar with Adobe Photoshop I decided to try photographing or scanning my hand sketches and using a tablet I bought, start trying to illustrate them.

Dr. Beulenpest

"Dr. Beulenpest, dressed in his finest for a night out on the town, wearing a Steampunk version of the classic plague doctor mask. Made of leather and cold-cast aluminium, the mask is held together with hand-stitched waxed thread and domed rivets."

Dr. Beulenpest is a fictional character created around the custom plague doctors mask made by artist Tom Banwell.
Tom Banwell, who made his living as a leather hat maker, turned to being more creative and entering the art world after a near death illness at age 57. He now creates a large series of Steampunk masks for sale, exhibition and as TV and cinema props.
The Photograph was taken by Topher Adam in 2010 who has photographed many models in Tom Banwell's creations.




I have a keen interest and fascination with the Steampunk genre, and found this in "Steampunk - The Art of Victorian Futurism".

 I decided to begin my summer project by drawing Dr. Beulenpest  and attempting to illustrate him.

I imported my hand sketch into Adobe Photoshop and began by creating a new blank layer I labelled as "LineArt" as I have to create the outlines first.

 Now that I am working on my LineArt layer, after reviewing a few online tutorials I found on YouTube and DeviantArt, I have decided to create my lineart by manipulating the Pen Tool.
I trace my hand sketch doing separate strokes, creating a basic line with the pen tool, then adding anchor points in order to bend and manipulate it.

Now that I have made my first path with the pen tool I can Right Click it, select Stroke Path, and the stroke to both Brush and Simulate Pressure, this means that I can use fades or pen pressure effects to my strokes along each path created by the pen tool.

Every line needs to be slightly different however, and certain lines must be thicker than others, so I go into my brush settings, and alter the shape, angle and dynamics of my brush to suit each individual line.

This began as quite time consuming but I soon picked up the pace and am beginning to perfect my line art for Dr. Beulenpest.

Finally from a mixture of using the pen tool, and some free hand drawing using a tablet, I completed my lineart, and created a base blue background just to see it on.

I can now move onto some base colours, and then shading.

I build up the base colours by creating solid colour smart layers, I am doing it this way as a pose to merely painting in the base colours so that I can keep them all separate, and also so that if I decide I need to change the base colours slightly at a later date it will be far easier for me to do so.

Now that all my base colours are built up through colour masks, I can begin working on shading and texturing my colours.

I searched online for some high resolution textures of various materials, that I could warp and shape to bade colours. I play with the opacity and blend mode of each texture layer depending on how they react to the colours.

I have far more textures to apply, mainly looking at different fabric textures for the coat, hat and cravat, but as the texturing went so well on the mask, I decided to try some shading on the mask too, just to get a better idea of the finished product.

I was at first unsure how to best approach my shading, but then I recalled an airbrushing technique I learned during my fashion project. I made a new adjustment layer for the images curves, I pushed the curve right up, making all of my colours incredibly bright, I then filled the layers' mask in black. I decided to then do the same to the opposite extreme, making a highlights layer and a shadows layers, the base colours I used acting as my midtones. I then use a white brush at a very low opacity, around 10% or lower, and slowly brush in my highlights and shadows through the mask, occasionally I also used a surface blur filter onto the mask, to help blend the shading a little.

I have begun experimenting also with different brush types, as the beauty of Photoshop CS6 is that it simulates a huge multitude of brush types, so I have been trying to get used to switching brush types to gain different textures and styles of highlights and shadows.

Now for the hair, I can use the same shading techniques as before, utilizing a brush at a low opacity, dealing with both the highlights and shadows on two separate layers. Getting the correct texture however is more difficult, as before I used high resolution flat images of textures and warped them to shape for things like the hat, the leathers on the mask, etc. But I cannot simply get a hair texture as it is far more complex.
Utilising the new brushes packs that come with Adobe Photoshop CS6, I simply have to alter the angles and a few other small settings on some custom brushes, and I should be able to create all of my hair manually.

As this brush has spaced out multiple strands I can overlay the highlights and shadows at low opacities in order to create my hair.

Now that the hair is complete, the rest of the image is simply a rinse and repeat of overlaying textures and shading by hand.

After review of my final image, I wanted to slightly alter the shading on the cane, and also I found the overall image a little too dark, so I lightened the overall curves.
The final touch was a fitting backdrop, this I did not care to create from scratch, I decided to simply pull a picture off Google, of the interior of an old Victorian pub. I simply added a 'cut-out' filter effect to the bar image and the gave it a Guassian blur.