Having spent quite a lot of time over the past few months basically learning how to draw and create art, I now have a creative tool that I can put to good use. My sister's birthday was coming up and I thought it might be nice to paint (can I still call it that if I'm using a computer?) something and use it as a birthday card.
She likes elephants. They're her favourite animal. I can kind of draw animals so I thought that's a good start.
Here's the first sketch.
I then added the outline and coloured the eyes.
I started with shadowing and then realised I had gone way too dark, too early. I did some colour editing on that layer to enhance the midtones, so in later images those shadows aren't so obvious. I also added that grey wash.
Used a fairly low opacity brush for the shadows and played around with the layer opacity to get it the right colour. I also added a foreground layer for the grass. The grass brush on CS4 is awesome. I've tried creating custom brushes and it's hard to get the settings just right. It's nice to have something so useful that just works right off the bat.
I used a really large brush to do the blue sky and used the grass brush again to create more...grass. I also had to add a white underlay to the elephant because the blue background kept showing through. I did this manually but I'm sure there must be an easier way. If anyone reading has any photoshop experience and knows a better way, I'd appreciate the info.
[click the image for full res]
I was also going to include this message as the inlay, but I didn't get around to it. I'm a bit of a sucker for that messy-but-somehow-neat script.
Sarah, if you're reading, Happy Birthday. Hope you liked the card.
Gret job!!
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