Andrew Bird Process

A few people have been asking me about my layers and how I get my pieces to look the way they do, so I took a few shots of Andrew and I’ll try and explain what’s going on.
-The original black and white watercolor/ink drawing which I scanned into Photoshop CS3.
- I’ve got my line art, inverted, on a mask layer. This way I can color the lines what I want, like on his shirt and his skin.
- I throw down my paper textures on an overlay layer. It goes over my color and under my line art.
- I create selections of everything, from skin, to the leaves, the birds. Then I make each selection into a layer, and add my basic values and colors with my splattering brushes.
- Now everything has its color.
- This is my details layer, where I do most of my mark making, add more values to the skin or other places, put in strokes of hair, ect.
- Now I add in more high lights on a layer above everything. I find sometimes I got a bit too dark and flat on my painting so I’ll add some stuff over the drawing to give things more dimension. I also created a layer called Gold for my gold effect.
- I added another splattery layer over everything, and set it to screen to create those orange splashes.
- I turn the file into a JPG and edit it’s levels to add contrast, and play with the curves to change the mood and color.
- There’s a screen cap of my layers.