Working with Photographs: Pop Art Edition
Introduction
Usually, when I use photographs in my work, it's usually for reference. But for this tutorial, let's
use photographs as a basis for pop art.
Prep
1. To start with, I picked out a photograph to use. Since I have a background in photography, I have no trouble finding suitable images to work with:
2. First, I rotated the image using the {Transform tool}, cropped it by making a selection over the cropped image, and adjusted the brightness:
OPTIONAL: The {Extract Line} function isn't necessary, but it can help in finding shapes to work with, especially from underexposed areas:
Sketching
1. Once I'm happy with the photograph, I made a new layer and sketched everything out. For the layer, I recommend the Vector layer, as it gives you more control over your lines:
As you can see, I changed some things to not make it an exact photographic trace. I exaggerated the size of the mountains:
And added a cumulonimbus cloud and a joshua tree:
Now the REAL fun can begin...
Paint
1. I added flats to every part of the painting, referencing a certain series of pop art paintings as I go along:
2.Once I finished the clouds and mountains, I added a gradient for the sky:
All of the parts are painted on seperate layers:
3. Now comes the fun part: adding detail. Note that I don't give detail to the desert floor nor the mountains because the paintings I'm referencing usually don't tend to add detail to these parts:
The car in particular took me the longest to complete, as it is the most detailed. I made two layers for it alone:
Optional: With a white layer set to color, I check for values and adjust them accordingly:
To finish it up, I added a paper texture and a noise filter:
Both materials I used can be found in the links below:
Finally, here's another painting I did around the exact same time using the same steps:
Conclusion:
Now let's see how you interpret these steps for your next piece. I love to see how you did.
Until next time...
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