Master Study 3: Step-by-Step

This study ended up being quite a bit of fun. I tried a few things with the brushes that I'm sure a lot of you illustration majors have done before, but were pretty new to me. I'm always curious about how people go about trying different things, so here's a basic step-by-step of what I did:

To start out with, I painted some basic brushstrokes and scanned them in. Then, one by one, I created a brush from each stroke. I saved them into a brush file called "paintbrushes," so whenever I needed them I just loaded the paintbrushes file within the brushes window. Pretty handy.

Next, I used the brushes to created the basic background. The custom brushes worked really well in creating a painted feel.

Next, I used some of the same brush but with different presets to create the graffiti writing. I ended up creating an additional brush that was a drip. Being able to change brush sizes easily meant I could do different drip sizes easily as well. Pretty cool. After I got what I wanted, I used Hue/Saturation to colorize the layer.

I traced the black outlines in Illustrator, but without having a tablet, it was tough to get the line quality I wanted. So rather than mess with the Illustrator brushes, I set the stroke to 0 (leaving just the path), and pasted it into Photoshop as a path, which I then traced with a brush for a consistent stroke.

Lastly, I went back and painted behind the lines of the traced outline, each color on a different layer. The final study isn't quite as detailed as the original, but I wanted to explore the different brushes more than the outline detail. I think it turned out pretty well; I'd never really used custom brushes before, and the more I use them, the more I'm starting to realize how cool they can really be.