Girl with the Green Crown Painting tutorial in Adobe Photoshop

In this simple tutorial I’ll show you how to digitally paint a fantastic girl character in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Beginners and also Advanced Artists can study this tutorial…I’ll be showing you some great techniques., and I hope this will be of some help to others. For this image, I used my favorite software: Adobe Photoshop. For my other works please visit my website http://www.3d2dizayn.com/ Should you have any questions or comments, please contact me at: 3d2dizayn@gmail.com

Tools used
• Photoshop CS3

• Wacom Graphire4 4×5 USB (Blue)

• You can download the main tutorial file for free.

Preview of Final Results

Download the PSD

Painting a girl Portrait_sketch.zip | 2MB

Step 1: The very first step of this tutorial is to draw the base sketch for the main idea . First of all Let‘s open a new document (approximately 700wide and 826 high, around 72 dpi) and make a preliminary sketch. (Ctrl+N or File > New). For now it is in 72dpi, but after changing the resolution to 300dpi (without re-sampling image) you can able to print it on A3 format in pretty good quality

* Width: 700px

* Height: 826px

* Resolution: 72.

Step 2: Let’s begin by first sketching the girl portrait. In my tutorial, I sketched it directly into Photoshop using my tablet. If it is easier, feel free to sketch your portrait on a piece of paper and scan it into Photoshop. If sketching isn’t your strength, you can download my sketch here. Now, here is the main sketch work which I draw, pretty simple….let’s not to try to make it super detailed because the lines will be covered up., you will go over it later. Choose a blue colour for the sky. Fill (G) the background layer in with blue (#6594d8).

Step 3: Now finishing the the sketch, I set the sketch layer to “multiply” … so you‘ll be able to see the before layer while you painting… When I felt my sketch is quite nice I named my new layer name as ”sketch” . Ah by the way I forget to tell you that I am giving my first psd file with the main sketch. You can use my psd file for the start. When you download the first psd file you will see the sketch layer. And now here as you see I have 4 layers. You must give a name to your sketch layer too.

Step 4: My color palette. An important stage in creating your artwork is to decide which colors are best for your painting. When you start a painting it is really very important to have a color palette…preferably at the corner of the painting. Here my colors don’t look attractive at first, but it allows you to control the scene from the very very beginning.

Step 5: Then I click on the Brush Tool (B) and choose a very thin, hard brush. As you know, soft brushes are the blurry ones and hard brushes are more solid. Note that you can have any color selected as your brush color because we’ll go over it with a layer style shortly. Here I am going to use only standard brushes with some different pen pressure settings. Here let me show my brush settings and these are the brush categories that I mostly use for this kind of paintings. And try your brush. See how soft it is and make some strokes with your new brush settings.

Step 6: We have basic colors and brushes , now we’re ready to paint. There are no need to go into the details. Try to see the image as a whole in this step. Make sure the layer of the color selected..not the layer of the sketch. We are going to use a large brush to put some general shading on the overall shape of the head and the neck. As you can see in the screenshot… nothing is detailed at this step.

Step 7: We are now starting to detail the face…adding more pink to her cheeks… and a little bit contrast to the sides of her face. A reminding; pay attention to your layers and make sure they do not clash with the skin or the hair. You can lock or hide all the layers except the hair layer. I use different layers for each part of the body… it is more easier that way to keep them seperated… so you don’t have to erase when you go over a line. Well, I delete the colors on her lips because I don’t want such detail on this step. Don’t be afraid to erase something..the more you draw the better anyway

Step 8: There are many ways to color the eyes. You can do that as what we did for the lips and the face.. firstly base color and a darker color for the shadows. And on a new layer you can begin the lips coloring. Lips tend to be same tone of red that you used for the cheeks. And also they tend to shine more from her cheeks. After that I work more on the eyes with a smaller brush making the eyes combining a few green colors.

Step 9: Starting to add some main details for the character…. I just add some basic detail for my character at this step. Using a smaller brush, I begin adding smaller paint strokes to add detail and to blend the colors together…then I took a smaller brush and a darker opacity.

Step 10: When I am looking for a color, I process like this. I have decide to quickly paint some light brown hair. I am continiuning to estaplish the major light and dark passages. Here as you see I am adding a little darky colors side of her face and some lighter color on the sides.

Step 11: And at this step I would like to change the size of my file because I’ll begin to add more details so I’ll need to make a bigger file size. I do wish my file is to be more bigger size because at this stage I do think I can’t make so much detailed painting. So I open Image/Image Size. Make the setting as you see..ok…ah I forget to change the Resolution to 300. Make it 300.

Step 12: Now at this step I would like to detail the eyes first…..I’ll work more on the eyes to bring her to life. And now use the burn tool a few times to darken the top of the eyes. Brush settings must be but 50%, soft round brush. And use the dodge tool to add shine along the bottom of the eyes. Finish adding light green as desires and create a new layer for shadow.

Step 13: Now for the lip make the same arrangements. So Here I choose the Dodge Tool and add some birigt areas and some new brush strokes. Here I used the Burn Tool (O) for the darky areas. if you want to work in details you must change the brush size. Make it smaller one.

Step 14: At this point, I would like to add some details on my eyebrows and her eyes. . I want my character have some detailed eye araound and so for this reason I painted some new green with my brush.

Step 15: I then worked on the crown.. I really want a detailed crown. I have inspired from butterflys for the crown design… . As you see there is always something to improve or change

Step 16: I continued refining and adding details, and so on. Using little brush size add more details. Here take a look at how I draw the roof details of the hair.

Step 17: By now it was time to start the detailing for the cloth . You can take a look for some real photos. Then I sart laying down the shadows for the dress. Here another layer above the first shade just on the green color layer. I set the new layer to “Multiply” and then merge with the first dress color layer. I start to clean up the edges of the dress slightly.

Step 18: I’ll now begin adding more red for her hair …..starting to refine the hair slightly. here as you see still no individual hair strands. I am pretty much finished painting her hair shape.

Step 19: Time for some more work on the background clouds. I selected the “cloud colour” layer and after that I began to add some light clours outline of the clouds. And here as you see I painted some rough shapes for the cloud and yet I’m not sure these are the main cloud shapes. Yet I’m not focusing in on any one area, I just start throwing down some shading to bring the volumes out. After running through a few possibilities, I decided on the one shown in. It was quite rough at this stage but that would be taken care of later.

Step 20: Here, I wanted to show you how I created a speed painting of some clouds using only a standart brush. And I must say ach element went into a separate layer, which allowed me to quickly select its contents and make color changes easily. Command+Click (mac) or Control+Click (windows) on a layer’s image in the ‘Layers’ palette to load its opacity as a selection. Start by the darker colors,then little by little, add the light. Go down in brush size and do some more detailed strokes. Also clouds will be brigher at the top so add some brigt colors on the top layer. Well, the best way is to take a look at some real reference clouds photos.

Step 21: Start by the darker colors,then little by little, add the light. Go down in brush size and do some more detailed strokes. Also clouds will be brigher at the top so add some brigt colors on the top layer. Well, the best way is to take a look at some real reference clouds photos. By the way, don’t use pure blacks or whites, as this will only make your picture look dirty. Instead, try mixing colours, like dark blues or browns, which will work much better. Now here is the finished cloud painting.

Step 22: Here now we can make some changes with the Warp tool on the clods shape. First choose the cloud layer and after that choose Edit/Transform/Warp. And make some changes with that…

Step 23: Once I’m satisfied with detailing clouds… Next we are going to add more details for the character’s hair, remember: start a new layer for each thing. Here as you see I draw some bird feathers around her. And for dress I use smudge tool too. The smudge tool is used to smear paint on your canvas. The effect is much like finger painting. You can use the smudge tool by clicking on the smudge icon and clicking on the canvas and while holding the mouse button down, dragging in the direction you want to smudge.

Step 24: Here I have added some more stronger highlights to her hair and now paint some little details….and also for the backgorund I started adding smaller details, such as glowing dots and , and fancy shadows . I decided that I wanted some more glowing parts. Well now I think I basically done with the character at this point. And once you have done that color and the shading again you should get something like this. And I forget to tell you save your work often. Use the hotkey. “Ctrl+S”

Step 25: And also I do want to show you how I added those shiny areas on feathers . Here is a detailed shot of feathers in my painting. I’ll show you step by step the techniques to create some glow effect smilar to what you see below.

Step 26: Click two times on the feathers .and a new window will open..from there click on Outer Glow. Here take a look at the settings.

Step 27: Once you’ve done the same settings the feather will glow like that. .Click on the Outer Glow tick box and click again on the Outer Glow word to bring up its menu. Make your Outer Glow setting as seen on the picture.

Step 28: Adjustments. This is really important. You can find a good color and change the whole atmosphere. I use now Hue/Saturation. Then I changed the brightness and the contrast. And you can see the light effect is different.

Conclusion

Well, now it is time to close the Photoshop. As you have seen on this tutorial there are no hidden secreets or magic trick to make you suddenly paint a nice character portrait….to get a good results you just need practice. As I have explained I used some standard brushes only. It took me about 3 to 7 hours to complete the work (with breaks, since the picture was drawn in my spare time). I hope you liked it! As a final touch I like to add a Smart Sharpen filter on the flattened result, to get a slightly crispier look. It really helps to make small details, like highlight spots. I must say I had a lot of fun with this piece and I think I learnt quite a bit from it. I hope you enjoyed reading this “Making Of”.