Atmospheric iPad Portrait
I began this painting by selecting five key colours to establish the mood of the portrait. Using ‘Adobe Kuler’ I exported the colours via the Creative Cloud to use later in the process.
With the colours selected, I sketched a number of potential compositions using ‘Adobe Ideas’. On a separate layer I then quickly mocked up how I was going to apply my chosen colour scheme.
I imported my final composition sketch into ‘Adobe Photoshop Touch’ and created two layers: one white layer to mask the edge of the face and a second layer beneath it to paint the basic tonal values of the face using the paint tool. I then turned my focus to painting the detail of the eye using a smaller brush. The eyes are always a great challenge when painting a realistic portrait because they are such an important part of a person’s identity.
Using a paint brush with low opacity I gradually built up the dramatic lighting of the portrait in greyscale. To soften the shading I occasionally used the blur tool. With the head painting complete, I then removed the white mask layer and procee ed to paint a background on a new layer beneath the head. I painted very loose shapes to suggest a city background and used the Gaussian blur effect to give the look of depth of field.
With the greyscale portrait complete, I then began introducing colour to the image. I created two coloured fill layers and used Blend modes to combine them with the painting: a yellow layer with the Multiply Blend mode to replace the light areas and a red layer with the Screen Blend mode to replace the dark areas.
Happy with the red and yellow colours, I then added green to the background to balance the image. To do this I did a Copy Merge of the whole painting and pasted it to a new layer. I then used the Multi Gradient Map filter to alter the colour range by adding the two green colours from my initial colour scheme.
I then used the Add Fade option to composite the new colours into the background only. I created snowflakes on a separate later and used the Directional Blur effect to give them movement.
To finish the painting off, I continued to experiment with the range of effects available in ‘Photoshop Touch’. I used the Add Gradient tool to add a vignette and added the Grainy Night and Scratches effects to complete the image.