To tell the truth, I am still learning a whole lot about the program, and am actually a little bit behind in the whole thing. Most of my hardcore intitial learng of PS came between versions 5.5 and 6.0. Then, all of a sudden, Adobe sort of “rocked my world” when they made major changes with 7.0. I was very confused and frustrated with a lot of the settings, as they seemed more complicated. When they came out with CS, they seemed to fix all of the things that bothered me about 7.0.

But I must confess- I do not do much exploring of the capabilites of this program. I find something that seems to work, and I sit complacent on that for a while, even if I do not understand it’s function 100%. For example- I still don’t understand the importance of the “flow” and “opacity” settings at tthe top… I just leave them alone, both at 100%. Call me naive, but remember, I never went to school for this stuff, and have pretty much “winged it” with success up to this point!

Only recently have I started to experiment a little outside of the traditonal hard edge/ soft edge brushes. I stumbled on th e”spatter” brushes, and messed tith the “scatter” settings, found that it made great realistic skin detail on photo-real portraits.

But all in all, I particalarly enjoy sketching with a hard round brushh the most. The smallest I usually have the brush set ot is “2″ or “3″, on a canvas that is anywhere from 7″ x 5″ at 150 dpi to 8″ x 10″ at 300 dpi, the latter being my most frequent.

ABOVE: Highlighted in yellow are my current favorite most used brushes.

ABOVE: My traditional brush settings.

ABOVE: “Dode and burn” are also my favorite tools to skethc with. (Dodge set to “shadows”, Burn set to “highlights”) Here are my preferred standard settings for those tools.

ABOVE: The “other dynamics” standard settings for those “spatter” brushes that I use for phot real skin, as well as the checking the box for “scattering”.

ABOVE: When you click on “scattering”, it of course opens up the settings for those parameters. Here are the favored settings I choose for example, on photo-real skin. The scatter slider can go up or down- all over the palce for me, depending on the effect I want to achieve in covering space.

The objective of this mattepainting was above all to improve my skills. I did not have an precise idea of what would give the final image. I wanted simply to carry out a urban landscape and to integrate natural elements into it.

The images used were found on the internet except the principal image which I bought on Fotolia.

Environment and Painting – Addition of a new sky created from several images of clouds found on google. At this stage, I start to “destroy” certain parts of the buildings, the panes, etc…

Flood – Addition of water. Render is a big work which requires a particular care concerning the lights and the reflections. The final texture of water is a mix of several photographs of rivers, ponds, etc…

Some steps for the water texture

The mix between different layers is done by using the blending modes.

Characters – The light imports enormously for a coherent integration of the characters. I still use «density» tools and blending modes to associate the different elements.

Vegetation – Same operations here as before

Final steps – The mains stages. Below, you can see all the elements added over the original image… not very aesthetic but helpful

I hope this «mini makin of» could help you Please email me if you have any query or suggestion
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by Pierre Fabre, France Web: www.gkaster.com

Aphex – Matte painting e compositing a Valle Giulia