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| HELLO DARKNESS #3. 2024. Photoshop, 4125 × 6263 px. |
I'm determined to make it to WRW 500 now. This is 3 weeks in a row! (We'll see if I can keep it up.) Today's installment is another Hello Darkness cover, one I had wanted to do from the beginning. Darcía is, of course, turning off the lights, as I've had her do in all these covers. Her seemingly sentient Testarossa has, for some inexplicable reason, eaten another car. (I don't make the rules. Actually, maybe I did in this case.)
I looked at a lot of 80s fashion photography, as well as some video game art. I found it a bit easier to paint than the other covers because I could just focus on rendering and the texture was added at the end. I need to just start doing that from now on. My problem with digital painting is that I spend too much time trying to make it look like real paint. Go touch grass!
I use the Photoshop Pencil tool to help with color studies. Even as a soft "airbrush," the pixels remain sharp and selectable (aliased). This makes it easy to play with colors, values, and gradients until I find the look I want. The scanned texture I used at the end is a board painted with grey gouache (with the layer set to Overlay or Soft Light).
I should note that the logo and trade dress is just a placeholder with credits from a previous issue. I just like having the element situated so I can make decisions accordingly.
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| digital color in Photoshop |
The pencils or line art is used primarily as a guide, but is sometimes incorporated into the final paint layer. It just depends on what I'm going for. Because the background is transparent, I often use it as a selection by Command-clicking the layer.
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| digital pencils in Photoshop |
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| digital layout |
Hi Paolo, I love your work and I greatly appreciate you giving us a peak behind the scenes of all of your references. Could you please tell me what the black hose thing it that you use to prop up the 1/6 heads in your reference? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually a steel 1/4"-20 socket screw. I bought a handful from Ace Hardware, adding a magnet to one end (so they always stand up) and a rubber thread cap to provide grip to the head sculpts. Thanks for reading!
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