Chapter 18: Painting a Strange-Looking Character

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Overview

This chapter covers several different concepts, including the creative use of texture-in particular, the use of texture to paint skin and background and the use of different color themes with the same subject. Many times, the skin we paint onto our characters gives the impression of an airbrushed photo. Now, someone wouldn't really mistake a painting of a monster with a photo, but much of the time the simple blemishes, scars, and flaws that make interesting viewing are eliminated or overlooked. The demonstration in this chapter will show you how to go about painting some of these types of skin effects so that you can produce a visually exciting image; it will also expand on these techniques so that you can apply them to backgrounds.

This chapter will also show the use of different color themes on the same subject matter. Why is this important? It is presented as a way to stir an artist's creativity. Often as artists we get into a comfort zone that we resist breaking out of. Sometimes this comfort zone gets boring, and we feel that we are out of ideas or our work is lacking that creative spark. Often it is nothing more than changing something as simple as the colors we are using to break out of the artistic doldrums. This chapter will show the same subject, in this case a face, painted with two very different color schemes. While this is by no means the only way to add a spark of creativity to our work, this is often a good way to start.

Often deciding which colors to use can be problematic . If we are feeling in a rut, the colors we choose may not be different enough from the colors we normally use to give that creative spark. Fortunately, Photoshop offers an easy way to give you some new and very different colors to paint with.

The first part of the chapter will cover how to give yourself different palettes to start painting your new and more creative image. We will then take the same image and, step by step, paint it in different color schemes, finally using custom brushes to add interesting colors to both the skin and background.

This chapter builds on the things you learned in previous chapters, especially in Chapter 15, which is about painting a face. If you have not yet looked at Chapter 15, take a minute to check it out. You should also be familiar with Chapter 17, which examines painting a face using textures, because much of that fundamental information will not be presented again here.

We will be painting a rather strange-looking character so that we can exaggerate the effects and still have the look be appropriate for the subject. As expected, this demonstration is done in Photoshop CS.