Digital paint is so much easier to work with than the real kind. It doesn't smell, it never spills on the table, and there are no messy brushes to wash out when you're done. It doesn't get under your fingernails and you don't have to wait for it to dry. In Photoshop, you can either paint a picture from scratch, starting with a blank page and using it as if it were any other graphics program, or you can take an existing image and convert it into a painting. In the course of this chapter, we'll explore both ways of working.
When we talk about "paint" in the digital realm, we're talking, of course, about image manipulation that mimics "real life" painting techniques. Since we're imitating real life, you might think that we'd be limited in the number of painting techniques that we can use--but this isn't the case. We're not just limited to watercolor or oil paint, for instance. Under the broad category of painting, we can include colored pencil drawing, pastels, chalk and charcoal, and even neon tubing, as many of today's artists and art students are doing. Even though digital painting is really the most spectacular part of Photoshop, as well as the most fun, you'll be amazed at how easy it is. More important, mastering Photoshop's painting tools will take you a long way toward becoming a more proficient digital artist.
Artists who work in conventional media have a great deal of respect for those who choose watercolors. It's probably the most difficult medium of all to handle. You have to work "wet" to blend colors, but not so wet that the image turns to mud. Doing it digitally is much easier. Photoshop has a watercolor filter that converts a picture to a watercolor version of itself. You can find the filter in the Filters+Artistic submenu, as shown here in Figure 7.1.
Figure 7.1
Watercolor is one of fifteen "artistic" filters.
The watercolor filter works most effectively on pictures that have large, bold areas, and not a great deal of detail. Also because it tends to darken backgrounds and shadows, it's best to start with a picture that has a light background. The photo in the figures that follow can be found on the CD-ROM as 07file01. It's a digital photograph of the ladder that encircles a water tank.
When you select the watercolor filter (or virtually any other Photoshop filter, for that matter), you open a dialog box like the one shown in Figure 7.2. It has a thumbnail view of your picture and a set of sliders that allow you to set the way in which the picture will be converted. If you click the thumbnail image, you can slide it around to see the effect of your settings on different parts of the photo. Most Photoshop filters have dialog boxes and settings very much like this one. After you have tried even one, the rest will be just as easy.
Figure 7.2
The Watercolor Dialog Box. Use the + and - symbols to zoom in and out on the thumbnail.
Filters can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more to apply. If you don't see the effects of the filter on the thumbnail view immediately, look for a flashing underline beneath the percentage number under the thumbnail window. It flashes to tell you that the computer is calculating the filter effect. When the underline disappears, the filter is applied.
Brush detail varies from 1-14, with 14 giving you the most detail and 1 being a sort of Jackson Pollock splatter effect. Depending on the nature of the picture you are converting and your own preferences, you may want to start experimenting with settings around 9-12. Shadow intensity can be adjusted from 0-10, but unless you are looking for special effects, leave it at zero. The watercolor filter darkens shadows too much, even at the zero setting. By the time you move it past 3-4, the picture's gone almost totally black. Texture settings vary from 1-3. These are actually quite subtle and you may wonder if they have any effect at all. They do but are more noticeable combined with less detailed brush settings. In Figure 7.3, I've gathered samples of different brush detail and texture settings so you can see the differences.
Figure 7.3
All three texture settings have been applied to each sample brush setting.
You might not want to convert all of your photos into imitation watercolors, but some look really good with this treatment. If you'd like to work along with us, the photo in the following examples is on the CD-ROM as 07file01.
Figure 7.4
We've set the brush to 12 and texture to 1.
Sometimes you either don't have a photo of what you want to paint, or you just want to do it yourself. Perhaps you want a different style of watercolor than what's possible with the filter. Photoshop is a pretty good painting program, although it doesn't have quite as many artist's tools as, for instance, Fractal Painter. Still, if you work patiently, you can produce watercolors that you'd almost swear were painted with a brush on paper. Let's open a new page in Photoshop and do some painting.
You learned about working with the Paintbrush tool on Day 3, "Painting and Drawing Tools." As you remember, you can leave the Brushes and Options windows open while you work, so you can switch from a large brush to a small one, or change the opacity with just a click. I also like to open the Swatches window and use it as a paint box to select colors, rather than going to the color picker each time. Please feel free to flip back if you need to refresh your memory about any of these things.
Transparency is one of the distinguishing features of a "real" watercolor. In order to make a "synthetic" watercolor, you'll want to set the brush opacity at no more than 75%. This means, because transparent is the opposite of opaque, that your paint will be 25% transparent, which is about right for watercolors. Try out the brush on a blank page and you'll notice that, as you paint over a previous stroke, the color darkens. Click the "wet edges" checkbox for even more authentic brush strokes. This option adds extra color along the edges of a stroke, making it look as if the pigment gathered there, as it does when you paint with a very watery brush. Figure 7.5 shows the difference between a normal brush stroke and one with wet edges applied.
Figure 7.5
Notice the greater transparency and faint darkened edges in the "wet"
example.
Watercolor artists painting on paper often start with an outline and then fill in the details. Figure 7.6 shows the beginnings of a watercolor painting of a flower. We've drawn the flower and its stem and leaves, and now we're working on filling in the leaves with a small brush. It's often easier to work in a magnified view when you're doing small details like this. By the way, this example is also on the CD-ROM. To see it in color, open file 07file02.
Figure 7.6
Use the brushes with soft edges.
Another useful "trick" for creating a watercolor is to use the eraser as if it were a brush full of plain water, to lighten a color that you have applied too darkly. Use it at a very low opacity to lighten a color slightly, and at a high opacity to clean up around the edges if your "paintbrush" got away from you. Don't forget that the eraser always erases to the background color. If you have been changing colors as you paint, make sure to set the background color to what you want to see when you erase.
NOTE: For this kind of task, a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet, though not an absolute must, is certainly helpful. Drawing with a stylus is far more natural than drawing with a mouse or trackball, and the pressure-sensitive function will permit you to make brush strokes that trail off like the real ones. The Wacom home page, which can provide more information on this topic, is located at www.wacom.com.
Most real watercolors are painted on a heavily textured watercolor paper. If you would like yours to have the same grainy character, you can use the Texturize filter, after your painting is completed, to add the watercolor paper texture to the picture. Don't apply it until everything else is done, though, because any further changes you make will alter the texture. Figure 7.7 shows the Texturizer filter being applied. The Canvas texture comes the closest to replicating watercolor paper, especially if you scale it down some. I like to set it for about 70-80% with a relief height of 3 or 4. Use the sliders to set relief and scaling. I found that applying the same texture a second time with the light coming from the opposite direction gave me the best imitation of textured paper. To see the result in color, open 07file02 on the CD-ROM.
Figure 7.7
The direction of the light affects the shadows that make up the texture.
Oil paint has a very different look from watercolor and it's a look that Photoshop duplicates particularly well. The qualities that distinguish works in oil are the opacity of the paint, the textured canvas that adds a definite fabric grain to the image, and the thick, sometimes three-dimensional quality of the paint. In order to get the full effect in Photoshop, you may have to combine several different techniques. We'll start, as artists do, with underpainting.
When an artist starts an oil painting of a landscape or a seascape, she usually sketches out the subject with a few lines, often working with charcoal or a pencil to locate the horizon and major land masses. Then she dips a big brush in thinned out paint and begins the process of underpainting. This blocks in all of the solid areas; the sky, the ground, the ocean, and any obvious features like a large rock, a cliff, or whatever else maybe included. Underpainting builds the foundation of the picture, establishing the colors and values of the different parts of the image. It's kind of like building the foundation and framework of a house before you start stacking up bricks to make the walls. Underpainting puts down all of the basic structure of the picture. Then, you go over it and add the details.
Photoshop's underpainting filter looks at the image that you're applying it to and reduces it to the same sort of solid blocks of color. In Figure 7.8, we've applied it to a photo of a beach, with some nice rocky cliffs in the background. The original picture is included on the CD-ROM as 07file03, in case you'd like to attempt to duplicate our work on this one.
Figure 7.8
Underpainting gives you the basic elements of the pic-ture, minus the details.
Using the underpainting filter requires making some settings decisions. The Texture settings are exactly the same as in the Texturize filter we used on the watercolor. Here, though, we want to bring out more of the canvas, so we would use a higher relief number, and possibly a larger scale on the canvas. You can also paint on burlap, sandstone, or brick, or on textures that you import from elsewhere. The Brush size setting ranges from 0-40. Smaller brushes will retain more of the texture and detail of the original image. Larger brushes give a somewhat spotty coverage and remove all the detail. Texture coverage also ranges on a scale from 0-40. Lower numbers here reveal less of the texture; higher numbers bring out more of it. In underpainting, the texture is revealed only where there's paint, not all over the canvas.
To turn the beach scene into an oil painting, follow these steps:
The underpainting filter leaves us with a somewhat indistinct picture, fine for some purposes but definitely unfinished. The way an artist would proceed is to go back and overpaint the areas that need to have detail. So that's what we'll do to complete this seascape.
In the real world, when you place a second brush full of paint over one that's already there, different things happen depending on the color of the paint you're applying, how opaque it is, whether the first layer is wet or dry, and so on. In Photoshop, you can control all of these factors by applying what's called blending modes. You'll find them on a pop-up list in the Paintbrush Options window, shown in Figure 7.9. As you can see there are quite a few different ones. Let's take a quick look at the blending modes and how they work.
Figure 7.9
Leave the Options window open while you work, to make changes easier.
Let's suppose that we're working with only two colors. One is the base color, the one that's already in place. The second is the blend color, the one that we will be applying with each blending mode enabled. We get a third color, a result that varies according to how we have blended the first two.
Here's what happens when you choose:
Dissolve may be the most useful mode for working into our seascape. Use it, as shown in Figure 7.10, to stipple colors into the underpainting. Vary the brush size and opacity to add more, or less, paint with each stroke.
Figure 7.10
We've added white to the surf and greens to the shrubbery.
You can go on painting into this picture until it looks exactly like an oil painting, or you can use it as a basis to experiment with other filters and effects. In Figure 7.11, we've taken the seascape and applied the smudge stick filter (Filters+Artistic+Smudge stick) to it. This filter, when used with a short stroke length, gives a nice paint-like texture to the picture. It does, however, also darken it quite a bit, so you may want to go back and adjust the curve again to bring back the sunshine. You can also increase the intensity to keep the picture from turning dark. This, however, will change the smudge effect as well. Experiment with the settings until you find a combination that works with the image you're using. You can see the result in color if you open file 07file04 on the CD-ROM.
Figure 7.11
The smudge stick adds texture to large flat areas like the beach sand.
Palette knives are traditionally used with oil paints and not with watercolors. Nevertheless, Photoshop's Palette Knife filter does a much better job of turning a picture into a pseudo-watercolor, or perhaps pseudo-tempera painting than it does into an oil paint clone. Keep the stroke size, detail, and softness all at low settings. The photo in Figure 7.12 uses a stroke size of 6, detail of 2, and 0 for softness.
Figure 7.12
The Palette knife gives more of a watercolor than oil paint effect.
The Pointilize filter is one of several under the general heading of Pixelate. The path to get there is Filter+Pixelate+Pointilize. All of the Pixelate effects work by breaking up the image into clumps of pixels, either random dots (Mezzotint), irregular blocks (Crystallize), or squares (Mosaic). These all stylize the image when applied at low settings and can completely destroy it if overdone. The Pointillize filter is possibly the most useful of this particular set, especially if you enjoy the paintings of Georges Seurat, inventor of the painting style called pointillism. The effects are shown in Figure 7.13. Crystallize, at a very low setting, looks much like the smudge stick filter above. At larger settings, it tends to over-simplify the picture, losing everything but a few patches of flat color. The Mosaic filter looks almost nothing like a tile mosaic. It simply enlarges the pixels, averaging the colors as it does so. The effect is not unlike that used to hide the faces of alleged perpetrators on TV news programs.
Figure 7.13
Experiment with the pixelate filters in order to understand their use.
Ever tried painting with a sponge? Photoshop's programmers must have done it, because they've given us a very nifty sponge filter. Like many of these effects, it's best applied to something that's fairly light to begin with, as it tends to darken the picture. The most successful settings for the Sponge filter are the small brush ones, although the range is from 1-10. Keep the Definition somewhere in the middle of its range and start with low smoothness. Experiment until you find a good combination for the image. Figure 7.14 shows an example of a picture treated with the sponge filter.
Figure 7.14
High Definition settings darken the picture.
Remember that any of these effects can be applied "full strength" or faded. Fading the filter effect is the solution when you like what a filter does to the image, but it does too much of it. In the case of the sponge filter above, for example, when I applied it to the picture of the gothic arches, it seemed to be just a little overdone. Fading it made a much better picture.
When you fade an image, you can also apply the blending modes previously described to the faded image. Photoshop then blends the faded percentage of the filtered image into the original unfiltered image according to the blending mode you have selected.
Before you can fade a filter effect, you must first apply the filter. If you'd like to work along with us on the sponge painting, locate file 07file06 on the CD-ROM. To apply and fade a filter, follow these steps:
Figure 7.15
The Fade dialog box gives you tools to set the fade percentage and how it's applied.
The Pencil tool has been part of every graphics program since the very first ones. It's an extremely useful tool when you know how to use it properly. The first thing to learn about it is that by holding down the Shift key as you drag, you can draw neatly constrained straight lines; vertical, horizontal, or at a 45-degree angle. The second thing is that it can also serve as an eraser if you click the Auto-Erase function in its Options window. With Auto-Erase enabled, when you click the pencil point on a colored pixel, you will erase it. Use this feature to clean up edges, or to erase in a straight line.
Pencils are great for retouching and drawing a single pixel-width line, but difficult to use for actual drawing. The pencil is easier to use if you set the screen to 200% so you can see individual pixels. Opening the control panel and setting the mouse acceleration to Slow will also help, but even better is to use a graphics tablet instead of a mouse.
If you want to get the look of a pencil drawing, without all the effort, try the Colored Pencil filter (Filters+Artistic+Colored Pencil) or the Crosshatch filter (Filters+Brush Strokes+Crosshatch). The Colored Pencil filter, which is shown in Figure 7.16, gives you a light, somewhat stylized drawing, from your original image. The Crosshatch filter, applied to the same image in Figure 7.17, retains much more of the color and detail, but still looks like a pen and ink drawing.
Figure 7.16
The Colored Pencil filter adds a light, airy, feel.
Figure 7.17
Crosshatching uses a different, more detailed drawing style.
Chalk and charcoal drawings date all the way back to prehistoric times. When the cave dwellers at Lascaux decided to decorate their walls, they used colored clays, chalk, and charcoal, with animal fat as a binder. Artists today use almost the same medium, except that the chalks are now compressed so well they don't need tallow. Chalk drawings in the real world can be found on virtually any surface, from grained paper, to brick walls and sidewalks. Chalk drawings in Photoshop let you take advantage of the capabilities of the texture filters. Place your drawing on sandstone, burlap, or on a texture that you've imported from another source.
Chalk and charcoal are linear materials, which is to say that they draw lines rather than large flat areas like paints. Choose your subjects with that in mind. You can, of course, apply shading as a pattern of lines or a crosshatch, and you can smudge to your heart's content. If you're drawing from scratch, start with a fairly simple line drawing and expand on it. If you're translating a photo or scanned image into a chalk or charcoal drawing choose one that has strong line patterns and well-defined detail.
When you apply the chalk and charcoal filter, which is found on the Filter menu (Filter+Sketch+Chalk & Charcoal), you'll see that it reduces your picture to three colors, using a dark gray plus the foreground and background colors that you have set in the tool window. Chalk uses the background color and Charcoal becomes the foreground color. Areas that aren't colored will appear in gray. You will probably want to do some experimenting to find the "right" colors. It's a little bit counter-intuitive, because the foreground color is usually the lighter one, and this filter applies it to the darker areas of the image.
Figure 7.18 shows the Chalk & Charcoal dialog box, which controls how this filter works. In it, you can set amounts for the chalk and charcoal areas. These sliders have a range from 0-20. Start somewhere in the middle and adjust until you get a combination that works for your picture. The stroke pressure varies from 1-5. Unless you want the picture to turn into areas of flat color, keep the setting at 1 or 2. Intensity builds up rather fast with this filter.
Figure 7.18
Move around in the preview window to see the filter's effects on different parts
of the image.
After you apply the filter to the picture, you can go over it with the Paintbrush and Eraser tools, adding back important detail that was lost in translation or touching up as necessary. In Figure 7.19, we've applied the filter to the cactus picture from Day 5. We can use the Eraser tool to apply the background color, and the Paintbrush to apply the foreground color. In order to add more of the gray tone, however, we have to sample it with the Eyedropper tool, so that we can paint it in. The gray is an arbitrary color used by this filter, and can't be adjusted.
To convert a photograph to a chalk and charcoal drawing, follow these steps: (If you're working along with us, use the cactus picture, 05file05 on the CD-ROM.)
Figure 7.19
When you erase, the page reverts to the background color.
The Smudge tool works nicely with chalk and charcoal. Use it exactly as you would to soften a line or blend two colors using your finger or hand on paper. Photoshop's Blur and Sharpen tools can also be used to define edges or to soften a line without smudging it. Figure 7.20 shows my final version of this picture.
Figure 7.20
I used both the Smudge and the Blur tools on this drawing.
Use the Charcoal filter (Filter+Sketch+Charcoal) to convert an image to a good imitation of a charcoal drawing. Because charcoal doesn't come in colors, your charcoal drawings will be most successful if you set the foreground to black and the background to white, or to a pale color if you want the effect of drawing on colored paper. The Charcoal filter dialog box is shown in Figure 7.21. You can adjust the thickness of the line from 1-7 and the degree of detail from 0-5. The light/dark balance setting ranges from 0-100 and controls the proportion of foreground to background color.
Figure 7.21
Experiment with these settings. Every image is different.
Figure 7.22 shows before and after versions of a portrait converted into charcoal and lightly retouched with the Paintbrush, Blur, and Sharpen tools. Using a graphics tablet instead of a mouse makes it easier to reproduce the filter's cross-hatched lines.
Figure 7.22
Retouching brought back the details which were lost in translation.
You can use the Paintbrush tool to draw a simulated charcoal drawing from scratch as well. I found that using a small to medium brush with black at 100% opacity in dissolve mode gave me the most charcoal-like line, especially if I then went over it with the Blur tool and blurred an occasional edge, as I would in a real drawing by dragging my hand over it. Figure 7.23 shows a charcoal drawing "from scratch."
Figure 7.23
Notice how the faint blur adds authenticity.
Conté crayon is a type of artist's chalk that comes in pressed sticks, in gray, sepia, or black. The Conté Crayon filter (Filter+Sketch+Conté Crayon) is effective for simplifying complex images, and for reducing an image to three colors. It's most effective in black and white or shades of gray, simply because the filter, like the chalk and charcoal filter above, applies a middle gray to any midtones it finds in the image. You can't reset the gray to a different color, so you might as well work with it. The Conté Crayon filter also places a texture under the drawing, as if it were done on canvas or brick. Figure 7.24 shows the Conté Crayon filter applied to a photograph.
Figure 7.24
Use the Blur and Sharpen tools to touch up edges.
Pastels are a kind of colored chalk but with a character very different from chalk. Pastels are less compressed and therefore go onto the paper with more pigment density, and with much fuzzier, softer edges. A pastel drawing, unlike a chalk or charcoal drawing, tends to be a blur of soft colors. Degas and Renoir, both French Impressionist artists, did many pastel drawings. Degas' pastel studies of ballet dancers are among his best known works.
Pastels, like chalk and charcoal drawings, are generally done on a rough surfaced paper. Photoshop's Pastel filter includes the same texture settings function you've seen previously with the underpainting and chalk and charcoal filters. These will be most successful when applied sparingly. Figure 7.25 shows a photograph of a bunch of carnations and Figure 7.26 is the same photo converted to a pastel drawing. The grain is deliberately kept fairly subtle so as not to add too much extraneous detail to the picture.
Figure 7.25
The original picture, with colors slightly adjusted.
Figure 7.26
Notice how the paper grain is more prominent around dark areas.
Figure 7.27 shows the Pastel filter settings that were used to create the picture. When you apply the settings, keep in mind the following considerations:
Figure 7.27
Increasing the Relief setting tends to fragment the image.
Drawing from scratch with pastels is more difficult. You don't get the right "feel" using a paintbrush on a smooth surface. Still, you can do a basic line drawing or color sketch and then apply the pastel filter to get the effect. If you decide to do this, remember to stick to relatively light, bright colors. The drawing will have a tendency to darken when it's converted with the pastel filter.
One of the main characteristics of a pastel drawing is that colors appear very opaque when applied densely but are quite transparent when applied lightly or smudged together. If you are using a wide brush and applying "pastel" as a heavy line, make sure to set the opacity to 100%, and make sure you haven't selected wet edges. Set the smudge tool option (in the Tool options window) for no more than 50% pressure. This will help make your drawing look more like you used real pastels.
The Texturize filter, and the other filters that apply it as part of their settings, can accept textures that you have created and saved as Photoshop files. Creating textures can be as simple as scanning a piece of rough paper or cardboard. You can walk around the neighborhood with a digital camera and find interesting textures to photograph and upload. You can even create textures out of other images or by starting with a blank page and applying filters to it.
If you have the set of Photoshop tools and plug-ins called Kai's Power Tools from MetaTools, you can create endless variations of textures from any image with the Texture Explorer tool that's part of the set. It's shown in Figure 7.28.
The KPT textures are meant to be applied to an existing picture, but if you start with a solid colored screen and add texture, you will end up with a combination of color and texture that's completely new. You can then apply another filter to it, if you wish, and perhaps convert it to black and white. Then, when you have achieved what you think will be a useful texture, save it as a Photoshop document.
If you don't have the KPT tool set, you can still invent your own custom textures, by combining the effects of several filters on an existing texture or image.
Figure 7.28
This is one of many tools in KPT 3.0.
In Figure 7.29, we started with a blank screen and the patchwork filter (Filters+Pixelate+Patchwork), which is one of the less useful filters for general purposes. After filling the screen with small patchwork squares, we applied the Ocean Ripple filter (Filter+Distort+Ocean Ripple) set for small ripples. Finally, we applied the Emboss filter (Filter+Stylize+Emboss) and got the effect shown in the figure, reminiscent of a ribcord bedspread. We saved it with that name as a Photoshop document. Now we can apply it to one of our other images. Figure 7.30 shows this texture applied to our pastel drawing.
Figure 7.29
This texture could be a tablecloth, or any coarsely woven fabric.
Figure 7.30
Keep the texture small if the image has lots of detail.
To practice applying a saved texture to an existing picture, locate the files 07file07 and 07file08 (texture) on the CD-ROM:
Figure 7.31
Use the pop-up menu to load a texture.
NOTE: Working with textures and multiple filters can use up a good deal of memory. To keep Photoshop from crashing, increase its memory size by another 3-4 MB.
Just as we did above in making a new texture out of several different filter effects, you can apply more than one filter to a picture. You can also apply the same filter more than once, if the effects the first time around were taking the picture in the right direction, but not quite far enough. Sometimes the effects of the first filter aren't quite what you want, but adding a second, different filter makes the picture something really special. In Figure 7.32, we started with the pastel drawing of the carnations and added the Dry Brush, Palette Knife, Sponge, and Sprayed Strokes filters over it. This figure can be seen in color on the CD-ROM as 07file05.
Figure 7.32
Each of these variations uses the pastel drawing (07file07) as a basis. Clockwise
from upper left: Dry Brush, Palette Knife, Sponge, Sprayed Strokes.
If you're going to apply two or more filters to a picture, start with the more subtle one. Otherwise, you can reach such a level of abstraction that no one will be able to tell what the image was originally, which may be okay, if it's what you want. It all depends on whether your goal is to enhance an existing work of art or create a new one.
Digital painting is an area where Photoshop truly excels. You can work either "from scratch" or converting images that you have uploaded as digital photos or scans or created in some other compatible program. Once you have the image in Photoshop, the various filters and brushes will enable you to turn your work into a good imitation of an oil painting, water color, or drawing.
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