Hello and welcome to my hastily thought out and poorly executed tutorial on how I make my mayhem. Be prepared; my techniques are probably not the most efficient or elegant. But they make things happen.
This tutorial was done using Photoshop CS6 on a Windows PC. Your software and computer will use its own set of hotkeys and commands, but hopefully what i demonstrate is clear enough for you to understand and replicate on your device.
So a pre-step I do with any skin is to re-arrange and organize the layers. I will pull the shadows layer off of the base mask and hide it. All my new layers i make while creating will be at the top of the stack, indicated by the âSKETCHâ layer there. I will turn down the opacity of the ink layer but not hide it completely.
I turn off all other layers on the base. You can delete them if you want, but occasionally I have found them useful when wanting to select only the wing area for something, etc.Â
Once our playground is prepped, its time to make magic. After sketching something I will line it out. Using a 3 - 4 px hard round brush I do those lines on a new layer, then hide the sketch.Â
Under the ink layer I make a new layer, this is what I will use to block out the non active area on the dragon. this should cover the entire outside of the object, while the inside remains blank/grey.Â
When you choose a location for your item on the dragon/dragon species: be mindful of the lineart and areas in deep shadow on normal dragons. Use this to your advantage.You can see how i did this with the dorsal fin on the wing arm, and the bottom part of the tail.
Next I do shading and highlights. the magic here is TRANSPARENCY. Transparency is your friend. Transparency lets you get away with things you normally cant. Making dragon objects is all about fooling the eye.
First thing I did was color in the white of the eye. I donât want it bright white, but i could have it white if I want to since it does not have any restrictions. On here I dropped it to a 50% transparency.
Next I did our shadows in black. Shadows are always below the whiteout layer. Here you can tamper with volume with how sharp or blurred you make your shadows. I tried to use a fuzzy brush here to portray the ROUND. When done I set my shadows to 60% opacity. I should note that these numbers are not set. In fact they are different every time I do them. Adjust it based on the illusion you are going for, some require stronger layers than lighter.
It should be noted that black must ALWAYS have some transparency. This accommodates the no black rule, while achieving a similar effect.
Next is highlights, which are always above the lineart. For this critter I used two sets of highlights. The faint ones with a blurred brush to create the scale reflections and fin waves, and then a hard line around all the surfaces to help define our shape. It will help it stand out against the dragon and preserve that illusion. The soft highlights are at 60% and the hard at 80%, though since they are white the transparency is not required, but suggested.
Now that our detailing is done, we can make sure our black outline is also transparent. We first do this by ensuring there is nothing underneath it on any of our other layers we drew on. In this case, that would be the whiteout layer, the shadows, and the eye.Â
We do this by selecting all the pixels on the layer. Windows with CS6 does this with Ctrl+Click on the layer you want to get the selection from. I then go down the line on everything BELOW it, hitting delete to clear that selected area on those layers. If you want, you can use the eraser tool on the selection for the same effect.
Once complete, you can set your line art layer to 90%, allowing it to be safely transparent.
With our object complete, it is time to prep the ink and shadow layers. Its here that you want to return the opacity/visibility of your inks and shadows to 100%.Â
I always start with shadows first. How i deal with shadows is a case by case basis. Sometimes I will lighten the whole thing by locking the layer and using a lighter grey/cyan and calling it good. In this case, our fish is not badly affected by those shadows, so we will only worry about our whiteout area.
First, create a layer mask. In CS6 on windows, this is selecting the shadow layer, then click the new layer button while holding down Alt. this brings up a handy box. Check the box that says âUse previous layer to create clipping maskâ then hit ok. Yay, now you can color the shadows how you want while keeping them in the right place.
Now that thatâs done, go ahead and use the Ctrl + click to select all the pixels on the whiteout layer, and go back to the new layer we just made. I experiment with any of those lighter greys until I get a shadow I feel like i can get away with. Itâs random whatâs accepted, so just do a guesstimate. Itâs easy to fix later if it gets declined.
Once that is done, go to the ink layer and do the same thing: Create your clipping mask, select all the pixels on the whiteout layer, and then color the line art a grey thats darker than the darkest shadows.Â
Our final bit of housekeeping with the line art is on our objectâs highlights. Create a new clipping layer on the inks, under the one you just made. Then select all the pixels for all of your highlights you did for your object. this may take multiple selections, but they can still be dealt with on this one layer. After each selection (i had 2 here, my soft and hard highlights) I select a dark grey, and use a big hard round brush to just fill the full area. This gently lightens the lineart ever so slightly. Its subtle, but makes a difference.
After that, we are done with the art itself! Now to prep it for its transparency and we are good to go!
We are in the final stretch now. These last steps are complicated to explain, but are actually very fast to execute.Â
Here i tend to duplicate my skin folder in case i have to go back and fix a whoopsie. But i did that here, then hid that folder. I then merged my layers. I merged all the ink ones (Ctrl + E will merge all layers that are selected). I then merged the shadows. NOTE:Â IF YOU MERGE THE SHADOWS, MAKE SURE YOU SET THAT LAYER BACK TO MULTIPLY!
And finally, merge all the layers attached to the base, but DO NOT INCLUDE THE BASE. It should end up looking like my image above. 4 layers.
Next is the tricky part. Open up your accent folder. You can then click and drag that base layer and stick it to the bottom of your accent folder. This WILL MAKE YOUR SKIN EXPLODE. THIS IS OK. We will fix it, i promise.Â
In the same folder, grab the ink clip layer and drag it down so it sits above the base layer. Select the base and the ink clip, and Ctrl + E to merge those two bad boys together. This is what we will use to clean up our skin.
We are now going to use that merged layer in the accents folder we made. Ctrl + Click to select all the pixels in it. Then go into your menu (Select -> Select inverse) or use a hotkey to invert your selection. this changes the selection from being the dragon, to being everything OUTSIDE the dragon.
Once you have that, select your layer with the art on it, and clear/delete the selected area on that layer. What SHOULD happen is that everything is deleted, leaving a nice happy outline of a dragon. This is what i do for all my skins and has been approved multiple times. It is very accurate.
The final steps are here! The last thing to do is to make another clipping layer mask on your nice and pretty skin art. You will then drag your ink and shadow layers onto it, and wala! Your object is transparent while everything else has the proper line art and shadows.Â
From here you do your normal prep: Resize to 350px and save as a Png 24. I ALWAYS save the full size version of the file. So I will undo the size change after i saved my png.
Aaand thats it! congrats! You now have a dragon that is actually something else, and will use a dragonâs colors to do it! You can see below my âTutorial Fishâ that we made here and what it looks like. If enough people want it Iâll get it printed.Â
But otherwise⊠yeah! My deep secrets have now been revealed.
Now go make me proud and create terrible things.
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