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It’s starting to come together nicely if I do say so myself! Now repeat for the clothes. Take note of the folds of clothing and the shadows the clothing creates upon each other when they are layered. Where the clothing is tighter, there will be lots of small folds, whereas where the clothing is looser, the folds will be large and flowier.
We are almost done our subjects!
The last step with our subjects is what I think is the most annoying and time consuming part of coloring a human—the hair. First let’s generally shade in the hair using the Brush and Dodge we should be very familiar with by this stage.
Now pull out your Wacom tablet, make sure it’s pressure sensitivity functions are working, choose a small Smudge tool (R) and set its Strength to something really high, like 90%.
Now use the Smudge tool with the Wacom tablet and drag the colors in the rough highlights and shadows that we filled in before back and forth in the direction of hair flow. You will get the effect that a mass block of color is actually countless individual strands of hair.
And our subjects are complete!
Part 3 – Background
First, let’s merge all of the layers used for creating our subject so they don’t get confused with the layers we will use to create our background. I like to create a new file to finish off my images so I can still keep a file with all of the subject’s layers. Because the plan for the background is to be a landscape, let’s make the new image horizontal. We’ll paste the subject in and then fill the background. I thought for a long time about what to make the background before finally settling on using a dramatic sunset. So let’s fill in the background with a vibrant orange gradient fading into a paler orange where the sun meets the horizon using the Gradient tool (G).
Next, let’s take a big brush and color in some dark blue to give a feeling of the night time that will come once the sun has set.
Before we go any further, let’s put a ring of light/color around our two subjects so they won’t completely disappear into the background once we’re done. Go to Layer->Layer Style->Outer Glow… and set all of the properties as such.
So if you compare the before and after Outer Glow images, you’ll see that there’s a ring of color around our two subjects, making them subtly stand out from the background.
Next let’s add in clouds. Take a soft brush, set the opacity lower, and draw lots and lots of circles on top of each other. Layer more for where you want the clouds to be thicker and less where you want them wispier.
Let’s add some more depth to the clouds. Because the sun at sunset is really bright, the portion of clouds facing it will be really brilliantly lit, whereas the parts facing away will be quite dark. So let’s use the same color and, using the same brush pattern, fill in some shadows to make it look almost like a storm is brewing.
Let’s put a layer of clouds in front of our subjects too so it looks like they are actually a part of the background rather than subject and background being two separate images. While we could manually draw more again, let’s just cheat, duplicate the cloud layer that we already have, bring it in front, lower it, and set the layer opacity to about 70% so the clouds don’t completely obscure the subjects.
Next, let’s add the sun onto the horizon. Instead of just dotting a glowing spot in, I opted to instead draw in rays shooting in four directions to make it more dramatic. With the pen tool, draw an X, right click Stroke Path… and stroke the path with a large, soft, semi-transparent brush.
Then draw a smaller X and stroke it with a hard, thin brush and we should have something like this.
Now let’s add a little more drama to the image and redden the horizon, allowing the red light to sweep over our subjects. With a really large brush, take a dark red color and sweep it in the same X shape as the sunlight. Then set the layer Blending Mode to Screen and the Opacity to 75%.
And we should have a red glow sweeping through.
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