Chapter 22: Painting the Heaven and Hell Image

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The image 'Heaven and Hell,' which we will be using in this chapter, was painted for an Internet art contest. The theme was, oddly enough, 'Heaven and Hell,' and was to be interpreted by the individual artist. It was decided that a new slant on the Christian concept would be used. Some rather traditional symbols were mixed with original ideas, and a model who got into character for both angels was found. After some reference photos were taken, the image was drawn directly on the computer. At the beginning of the process, the final size and resolution of the image were uncertain . The image needed only be viewable at computer screen resolution, but perhaps prints would be made if the finished piece was acceptable.

The demonstration in this chapter follows pretty closely the steps used to create the image. As in all of the demonstrations in this book, we do not take a lot of time to specify specific brush settings or any other of the more mundane aspects of the painting on the computer. These demonstrations are about creating paintings, with all of the flaws and problems that artists encounter, and all the while hoping to have an acceptable end result.

What You Need to Know About Photoshop for This Chapter

The following tutorial assumes that you know some fundamentals of working in Photoshop, such as:

• Where individual palettes are located

• How to adjust a brush's opacity

• How to adjust the grain influence on a brush

• How to create layers and change their blend mode

• How to resize your brush and sample color from within the image (preferably using the hot keys)

• How to create and use patterns

• How to create brushes

You can arrange the Photoshop workspace to suit your own liking, so this chapter does not discuss where to locate specific items.