Illustration Friday - Layer - Digital giant leap. And, an After Hours Drawing

My first all digital painting! Thanks to Will Terry, my digital baby steps got a lot bigger in the past couple of weeks. More like one big giant leap! How nice that this week's Illustration Friday prompt was 'layer.' I learned how to use layers and a whole lot more from Will's series. I can't recommend it highly enough. Not only is it jam packed with information that even I could understand, it is a bargain as well. Will is such an amazingly generous guy! Check out the series here. I'm happy to share some of what I've learned, but don't want to give too much away. It's much better for you to see for yourself! Thanks Will! You are a spectacular illustrator, a great teacher and such a fine and generous person! I can never thank you enough!

In addition to Will's video series, I also had help from Rob Colvin, a wonderful landscape painter and fellow contributor to Illustration Friday. Rob, like Will, is a generous teaching artist. He was very kind and helpful in getting me started! I am so lucky to have connected with Rob. I'm in awe of his work and so grateful for his help too!

Scroll down if you'd like to see some of the steps that I followed to make this illustration.

There was no doubt what my first color would be!

                                                                               

Next, the sketch is opened in photoshop and dragged onto the textured underpainting. It automatically becomes a layer. In the layers palette, select 'multiply' to blend the background and sketch layer. 

Learning how to make a textured background to use in photoshop was one of my favorite things  from Will's video series. I created the texture, imported it into photoshop, then applied the color I wanted for my underpainting. It's all explained in the video series.

Here's the sketch that I started with. You can see, I decided to leave a couple of things out in the finish. The drawing began as one of my After Hours Drawing series. A swipe of my pencil on the paper became the shape of this guy's head. And the rest flowed from there. These drawings really feel as though they create themselves and I'm just along for the ride.