Hey gang , It’s been a long time, I know, but there’s been a lot going on for me lately. Just to let you know that I’m alive and well, here’s a little somethin somethin I worked on a little while ago. It’s a female rendition of the Soldier from one of my favorite games: Team Fortress 2. I’m eventually gonna use it as a spray to put on walls during matches, hopefully over the corpses of my opponents.

Right now, it’s in the sketch phase, laid out in black and white. I’m gonna share some of my tips for creating this as I go along. Not so much a tutorial, but some helpful hints you can use when you create artwork in Photoshop.

Tools: All my work for this project will be created in Photoshop CS3… even the sketch phase. Photoshop is probably the most useful tools to sketch with, and I’ll share some settings I used to make it feel more like drawing on a sketch pad as opposed to drawing on a computer. I don’t advocate ONLY drawing with one or the other. PS has it’s advantages, such as the ability to undo, layer, and change hundreds of other little options. But I don’t view it as a replacement for actual, physical drawing. Maybe one day, when I get a Cintiq, I’ll change my view on this a bit, but for now, knowing when and how to use both digital or physical drawing is key to getting your project started right.

Right now, I’m using a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. It’s the 6×8 variety, big enough to allow large movements, but small enough to fit in a backpack or shoulder bag. Know and get familiar with utilizing the pressure sensitivity… It will expand EVERYTHING you can do when doing digital work.

Getting Started: First things first, I need to create my document in PS. This picture is only going to be viewed on a computer screen, so, I’m going to make sure the color mode is RGB and the resolution is 72 pixels/inch. Since I’m only doing a black and white sketch, I won’t go into detail about the resolution and color modes, I’ll explain more about those in a later post as it demands an entire article on it’s own. Here’s a peek at my settings.

Beginning your sketch: Even though the end product will be transparent around the edges, I like to create a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. You can do this easily by pressing shift + F5 or going to edit > fill. You could also do this by selecting a fill color for your Background Contents when you  create your document, but I always forget…. annnnyways…

Shift + F5 or go to edit > fill

The reason I fill the BG layer  is that with this method of sketching, I’ll be using a lot of transparent colors. Over a transparent background, they will be VERY hard to see… So I fill it in with either 50% Grey or White. Most of the time I use grey because when I eventually lay color in, it provides a neutral comparison as opposed to seeing the colors against an all white or an all black background. Now, it’s time to sketch.

Here’s where you can start to see the power of using a Wacom tablet combined with Photoshop. I used to just get my Brush tool, pick a color and go right at it, but once I learned how to utilize my different brush settings I developed a method to make it more like natural drawing. Now if you’re drawing with a pencil and press down hard, You’ll get a dark line right? On the contrary, when you press lightly, you get a light line right? If you keep drawing on that light line with the same pressure over and over again, it gets darker and darker with every stroke. We’re gonna re-create that feeling with the wacom and some brush settings.

Select your brush tool or press B to use your brush tool. Then go to Window > Brushes or press F5 to open up your Brushes window. In here you can alter everything that happens when you use your brush tool. When you get a chance, come to this window and fool around with all the settings and experiment to discover all kinds of uses for this window when you’re painting. For now, we’re just going to duplicate my sketching setup. Click on Brush tip shape and reduce the spacing slider all the way down to 1%. When you’re using the brush tool in PS, the program is really just drawing a series of circles. Setting this number as low as possible ensures that all of your brush strokes will be smooth as possible. Set it at anything above 50% and try a brushstroke and see how it’s different to get an idea on what this slider does.

Next, make sure all other boxes are unchecked except for “Other Dynamics”. Then click on “Other Dynamics” the word not the checkbox. Under “Opacity Jitter” click on the dropdown box labeled “Control” and set it to Pen Pressure. Also make sure that Jitter is set to 0%.

Setting the opacity for pen pressure

Now, every time you make a brush stroke with your stylus, the opacity will vary depending on how hard you press down, just like a pencil. You can follow the same steps with your eraser tool selected and it will do the same thing whenever you erase.

Setting up your brush and eraser this way helps me SKETCH in a more natural way over a solid background. It won’t work as well when I start laying down my base colors, but for sketching, it works fantastic. While drawing, change your brush/eraser diameter sizes by right clicking on your canvas and moving the slider, or the easy way, by using the “[" and the "]” hotkeys. Zoom JUDICIOUSLY with Command + or Command  - (Ctrl if you’re on PC). Or hold Command + Spacebar and draw a box on what you want to zoom in on to have more control.

Like I said, there’s TONS of settings you can mess with on your brushes alone, so this barely scratches the surface of PS’s potential. Mixed with the different layer abilities the possibilities are endless. There’s plenty still for me to learn as well, so I don’t want to act like a know-it-all, but if you have any questions, lay em down in the comments below and I’ll get back to you the best I can. Until next time, EXPERIMENT, PRACTICE, AND SAVE OFTEN!