WALKTHROUGH: PAINTING BACKGROUNDS WITH A LIMITED PALETTE

Recently I have been experimenting with a drastic simplification of color, and the stuff I'm turning out is a hundred times better for it. If you are the sort of person who tries to draw every leaf on the tree and gets discouraged because it never turns out like you want it, this method may be for you.

Do you think we could make an ocean sunset with these four colors?

...I'm gonna have a go :)

• HARDWARE: Wacom A4-size
• SOFTWARE: Photoshop 5.0
• TOOL: Paintbrush 100% Opacity (Hard Round 10px, 50px)
• STYLUS SETTINGS: Size YES, Opacity NO, Color NO

Stage One

After a lot of angst, Googling and even a fruitless trip down to the local harbour, I drew a reasonably competent boat. This tutorial does not cover drawing.

These images are shown at 12.5% of actual size. I am working with the image at 25% of actual size, though, so it isn't a huge reduction on what I am seeing myself.

Firstly put the colors down where you want them. In pretty much everything there will be dark moving towards light, so I will have a darker color away from the light source.

Stage Two

Next it's time to break up the hard edges, working one color into another in a natural way. This holds true whether you are painting sea, sky, fields, whatever.

For the sea, I need to make it look like waves, which means it's mostly scribbles side to side, except for the bit where the boat makes a bow wave. The light source here is low and the tops of the waves will be lit while their bases are in shadow. Doing light correctly is the key to something looking sensible.

Stage Three

After some time I have this :) I am not done with the sea yet but it blurs into the sky, so I am going to start doing the sky too.

The quite dramatic change from the previous picture is really just me breaking up the hard lines from earlier with little splots, and of course starting to add the yellow, by making more splots. There are no tricks here, just making one color blend into another.

All this except for the boat is on the same layer.

Stage Four

There is method to my madness.

The sea is moving towards done now. I set the brush to 50% opacity and put a bit of that yellow on the pink of the sky, then use the eyedropper to pick up the color. Returning the brush to 100 opacity I start blending the yellow and pink together. It is streaky because the evening sky will be streaky :)

I make further variations of colour the same way: dabbing one color on another at 50% opacity, then picking up that intermediate color and painting with it at 100%.

Stage Five

See, that yellow blob came out okay :)

The sun is a lighter shade of the yellow I already used. Everything gets blended in more, and I put some highlights on the water.

Click here to see how it came out.

Email: quillandlauren@yahoo.com
AIM: eloze (email me first with your AIM name so I can add you)
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