Making of Elizabeth Tudor: Photoshop Tutorial

Aug 5 2010 in Articles, Tutorials by admin |

In this detailed tutorial Vivien Hulbert, an Italian digital artist, shows how to create a realistic portrait of the famous English queen.
Author: Vivien Hulbert
Source: www

My intentions for creating this image were solely to improve my digital painting technique, and to test my patience. I decided to use an inspiring stock photograph I found on www.deviantart.com. The stock artists name is Lockstock (http://lockstock.deviantart.com). Here is the original image. As you can see I modified the colours, making them cooler, and cropped the image considerably mainly because I wanted to main focal point to be the face/collar.

Some great digital artists out there begin by blocking out colours and then slowly add details refining the shapes as they proceed. I haven’t tried that yet, and coming from a traditional art school I have been taught that a good drawing makes a good painting (and I’m pretty sure Titian also said so :-). So I drew the face as well as I could, not worrying much about details, all I needed were the outlines of the shapes and shadows, but I wanted them as precise as possible. When I do a recreation of an image, be it digital or traditional, I always work with the original right next to me, comparing almost every stroke. I find you learn alot that way although I know it seems a mechanical process. This painting in fact was not intended to be considered a “work of art” but more of a study, as I stated above.

So anyhow, here was my base, this is what I started from. Initially I wanted her dressed so I drew in a sleeve but later (after painting it almost completely) I decided that it would have been a distracting element. I went back to the bare arm, as in the original.

I dove immediately into doing the face because I really wanted the enthusiasm of the painting to come through there….I know myself pretty well, I can get bored, and I think you can see that sometimes in peoples work! I filled the skin level with a pinkish colour as a base for the skin then I started putting in blotches of color. Looking at it now it seems pretty crude but I’m glad I hung in there. The skin of the face was done all on a single level at this stage.

I continued adding the base colours on the face, created more levels for the neck and eye. At this stage I used exclusively a soft round brush and the blending brush without scattering.

Then I started on the collar using a hard round brush both for painting and blending, worked more on the eyes (added some reflections and duplicated the iris on the left to make the eye on the right). The shadows in the original photo were pretty harsh so I tried to soften those a bit by blending.

I started on the necklace and it was actually pretty easy, all I did was paint one pearl and then duplicate the rest, rotating, scaling and changing a few shadows and reflections here and there where needed. I placed them and decided to do the chain that keeps them together later.

Next, after trying to smooth out the neck a bit, came some work on the hair. I put in a dark base, as I would in a traditional painting, and with a small hard round brush with shape dynamics/size jitter set to pen pressure and other dynamics/opacity jitter also on pen pressure, I started drawing strand by strand, some very fine and others fatter until I got a nice “hair” looking base. I then slightly blended that base.

I redrew more strands on top of the blended hair base making the hair come more to life that way, with some highlights and other darker strands here and there. I then realised that maybe I should try using a custom brush to speed things up. I used a custom brush made of little dots with the same settings as before plus spacing at 1%. I recommend it if you don’t want to go mad painting hair.

Shadows on the neck level under the pearls were added. You will notice that I also flipped the canvas. You wouldn’t believe how much it helps after you’ve been looking at the same thing for hours and hours on end…by flipping the canvas it was almost as if my eyes were looking at the painting for the first time, and I could see where it needed fixing. Also cleaned up the outline of the cheek, drew in the eyesbrows a bit better, and finally some blotches on the hand…

Here I had painted part of the now erased sleeve in grayscale, so don’t mind that, I just don’t have any other screens of this stage. You will note thte black background, no real reason for doing that, I just wanted to see how it looked with a dark background, and I could see the outlines better and if they were clean.

The main thing at this stage was the texturing I did on the skin. I used 2 textures on the skin: One with pores in grey scale, and a color map with freckles.

I duplicated the skin level. I never apply a texture before first keeping a copy of the original level! On the duplicated level I applied the pore texture using the texturizer. The settings I used were scaling @ 50% and relief @ 9. The direction I selected was the same as the light source in the picture.

For the freckles, I didn’t use the texturizer. I opened the freckle texture on a level of its own and scaled the image to the size that looked ok. This level is the one on top of all the others since I wanted it to affect the whole painting. I then applied the following settings to the freckle level: i set the level style to linear burn and brought down the opacity to 43%. Wherever I didn’t want the freckles (like on the collar) I just smudged.

Before starting on the hand and finishing the collar I decided to do the background. Big mistake! (for me anyhow). The background, which is supposed to look like a silk curtain thing hanging, was fairly fast and easy to do, wheras the hand was time consuming, as was finishing the collar. I started cleaning up around the borders of the collar.

I tried to keep the hand and chest area as realistic as possible colour wise, so as to accentuate as much as possible the powdered face and made-up look. The hand and chest were done exactly like the face, except for some specular added on the hand with a hard edged brush. I think one of the most important things is being able to zoom way in, and also being able to see the subtle “in between” tones and reflections that make an object or living thing look real.

Here you can also see how I was proceeding with the collar. And I flipped the canvas, again!

I also created a level on top of the face level and fixed some issues that looked “off”, added some final chiaroscuro here and there. Then I let the face go, either I stopped or I would never be satisfied with it.

Another problem that I fixed was the eyes, they looked too “glass-like” so I lightened the irises and they seemed to come out nicer that way.

All that was left now was the last part of the necklace and the collar.

That’s it. I think it took me over a month working off and on, but I really have no idea how many hours. Next time I will try and count! About system specs etc, I worked with a trust tablet with photoshop CS2 and I use a pentium4, 2.6 GHZ, 2 GB Ram, Geforce 6800 and 2 hard disks of 80 GB.