Cinematic Digital Illustration with Photoshop

Cinematic Digital Illustration with Photoshop

“Now we made it to the end of the course, it’s time to start your Final Project! I am really excited to see what you produce. First, you must find your photo reference. You can find this photo reference in a multitude of ways. • Get outside and take some photos yourself. • Research photographers on Instagram, Flickr, or Twitter. • Pinterest—if all else fails Pinterest is a great place for inspiration. The downfall to Pinterest is that often credits for photographers get lost. Analyse your photograph. Before you even get started I want you to sit down and create a plan in your head of how you’re going to approach this photo study environment illustration. This will set you off in the right direction and mean that every decision you make is for the benefit of the story you have already started to plan. • What drew you to this photograph? • What story are you going trying to tell with this illustration? • How can we add to that story by editing composition, lighting, design, or adding characters? • Are there areas we can exaggerate in design? • Is the image strong in its value structure or can we improve it? (Remember you can turn your photo into black and white to judge this more clearly.) Now it’s time to put pen to paper, or in this case—Wacom pen to tablet! • Sketch your layout. • Next you’ll add some base texture and colour variation to your blocked-out shapes, finessing their colours to match your photo reference better. • Once your base texture is done, you can begin working into your image by adding lighting information to define areas of shadow and light, edges, overhangs, groves, alleyways, making your blocked shapes start to feel more 3D and more real. • You can then start to work in more detail. • At this stage it’s time to consider things you can add to your illustration to make it feel more alive! Once all your final details are in it’s time to tie up the image by: • Adding any final lighting information, such as highlights, glows, and increasing shadow contrast. • Checking your values are working and improving them with adjustment layers if they need it. • Colour correcting your image using adjustment layers such as “Selective Colour”, remember to check how your image reads on other monitors as Wacom screen colours vary. • Adding cinematic effects such as “Noise” to the image to give a film photography grain and by blurring the foreground and background elements to give depth. You’ll then export your image, saving various crops to highlight parts of your image you are proud of and share it online. Remember to properly credit your photography reference. Here is how you can present your final project: Photo reference

Sketch map Image block Final project When you feel a ready click on “Create your project” and upload your final project. This way we can see how you’ve interpreted the reference image. With your final project complete you can start to build your artistic community by interacting with other students of this course and following their social media accounts. Continue to do photo studies as a way to learn more about how to draw and paint the world around you. I encourage you to interact with your fellow coursemates and the projects they have created—be supportive, and please let your coursemates know if you’re happy to receive feedback from them as well as me! I’m hoping you can all grow and learn more by supporting and uplifting each other’s work. I’m really excited to see what you create, offer feedback, and answer any questions you have. Good luck! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project Congratulations on completing my course on cinematic environment illustration. You've achieved so much and you're all set to keep on creating great work. You started by learning why photo studies are valuable for you. I let you into my mantra, seeing, interpreting, and retelling to help create your fantasy worlds. We enhanced your story by adding and removing things from the composition and how important this is for your artwork. I taught you about values and how they are integral to creating a strong piece of art. We saw the steps to give your artwork a personal design by sho...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Cinematic Digital Illustration with Photoshop

• Level: Beginner
• 99% positive reviews (842)
• 17908 students
• 4 units
• 28 lessons (6h 39m)
• 5 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Concept Art, Digital Illustration, Traditional illustration