[1] Painting the reflective glass

I’ll move on to painting the glass in the foreground.

 

I create a new layer folder called “glass” at the very top, then create a [Hard light] layer inside the folder to paint the reflective light of the glass.

 

Using the perspective ruler I made when making the background in the base painting, I draw some imaginary perspective lines in red. I’ll try to paint the reflections along these lines.

 

As I paint the reflections, I imagine the outside scenery such as blue sky and pavement stones reflecting onto the window.

 

I also brighten up the characters a little more with an [Overlay] layer.

 

Now I’ve mostly finished painting.

 

[4] Adjusting the contrast

I want the illustration to focus on the top half of the characters, so I lower the contrast of the lower part of the illustration.

 

I use the [Polyline] tool to roughly select the area I want to adjust, then go to the [Layer] menu > [New Correction Layer] > [Tone Curve] to create a [Tone Curve] layer.

▲ The red area is what I selected with the [Polyline] tool.

 

I lower the contrast and make it slightly darker.

 

When I raise the left part of the curve, the dark colors get lighter, and when I lower the right part of the curve, the light colors get darker. I adjust the curve as shown below to lower the contrast between light and dark areas.

 

I check the preview as I adjust the tone curve to get the balance I want.

 

I created the [Tone Curve] layer after creating a selection area, so the [Tone Curve] layer has a layer mask over the outside of the selection area.

 

I will blur the boundary of the mask.

 

I click the thumbnail beside the [Tone Curve] layer to select the layer mask. A box will appear around the thumbnail when it is selected.

 

While selecting the layer mask, I click the mask icon at the top-right of the layer palette and select [Show Mask Area]. The mask will appear in blue.

 

The area covered by the blue indicates where the tone curve adjustments haven’t been applied.

You can edit layer masks with drawing tools. I use the [Eraser] tool > [Soft] to blur the boundary of the mask.

After I’ve finished blurring, I uncheck [Show Mask Area] to hide it again.

 

To darken the zone where I applied the tone curve corrections a little more, I make a new [Multiply] layer on top and paint some more shadows around the areas I just darkened.

 

Now I’ve finished painting the glass reflections and adjusting the contrast.

 

Next, I’ll add some finishing touches.