Refining the headdress

I take a rake brush with a rust texture inside it and paint lights and shadows so that the headdress matches the rest of the painting. You can make your own textures to put inside your brushes by opening a texture photo and then selecting Edit> Define Pattern. It now appears inside your texture tab in the brush preset window. Reduce Flow to better integrate the texture.

Custom brushes can be used for painting, but also for smudging, erasing , dodging, burning and so on! For example, you could paint a decoration on the clothes with a pattern brush and then erase inside your pattern using another pattern brush to achieve more cool effects and patterns. Dodging with a dirt brush can also be a great way to obtain realistic metallic surfaces.

Depicting folded cloth

For my character’s kimono outfit I create a simple rake brush. Then I set Angle Jitter to Pen Pressure and add a dirt texture in Color Dodge mode. I give it a dual-brush setup with a simple Hard round brush, select Other Dynamics and choose Pen Pressure. Now my rake brush spins around itself in an irregular way – perfect for painting realistic folded cloth!

I drop all my layers and duplicate my background. Then I add a noise effect to the layer above (Noise set to 400 per cent). I repeat my noise effect a couple of times and then set the layer to Overlay with between 2 and 5 per cent Opacity. I also use Gaussian Blur and Filter> Other>High Pass to adjust focus throughout my image. Then I drop all my layers again and then go to Channels. I move the red, green and blue channel each one by one pixel. This creates a pseudo 3D effect. Finally I play around with Color Balance to do my final colour tweaks.

March 2015