Making Katamari in the Snow

Here's a quick rundown on how I watercolored "Katamari in the Snow".
First, I started with the vector trace (Illustrator 9):

Then I moved on to Painter 9 and the watercolor tool:

This is similar to how I've watercolored previous works (such as Mountain's Red Leaves.

Wallpaper Walkthrough: Painting "Under the Sakura"

This is a special Paint-o-Rama walkthrough for my wallpaper, "Under the Sakura" as part of the "Let there be Light" contest.

I used Photoshop 7.0 for scan reconstruction/post production and Painter 9.0 for watercolors.

Preparation: Scan Extension
I started off with this scan of Takamichi's artwork. Since this artwork was vertical, I basically had to redraw a bunch of cherry tree branches. You can see that process in this breakdown by layers.
The "sketch" layer was used to get a feeling for where I should start adding or extending the branches so that the wall felt full, and I didn't feel obliged to follow it too closely.
The "flowers" layer consists of 2 different flower sets extracted from the original scan, repeated at different intervals. In order to keep it from looking regular, I rotated most of the clones and resized them. As long as you can keep from creating a pattern, you should be able to distract the eye enough that people won't realize the flowers are cloned for a while.


Preparation: Setting up Painter
First, I set up the Painter interface. I took the extended scan from Photoshop and saved it as a bitmap. I opened this in Painter, moved the image from the background to a layer on top, reduced the opacity to 25% and locked it to prevent myself from accidentally moving or painting on it. I also set the background to a pale blue color. That way I'd know where I'd painted and where I hadn't.
I had the original bitmap open again so I could use it as my clone source. Then I set up my watercolor brush to clone and was ready to start painting!


Branch painting 1 - coloring the inside
To start painting the branches (which are outlined) I first painted the inside of the branch with a 3-5px brush. You can see in the screenshot that the strokes overlapped the flowers. As long as the center of the brush doesn't cross over the edge of the flower, it will continue to paint in brown (that's why I use a larger brush.) I'll clean up the flowers' edges later, but this ensures there are no gaps.


Branch painting 2 - coloring the outside
To continue painting the branches, I next painted the outside of the branch (the grassy area) with a 3-5px brush. I overlapped the grass over the edge of the branch similar to how I overlapped the flowers' edges in the previous step.


Branch Painting 3 - coloring the edges
With a 1px brush, I went back and cleaned up the edges of the branch, making sure that I covered up all of the overlapping grass from the previous step. The 1px brush is laborious to use and usually too sharp for a good watercolor effect, so use it sparingly for the most fine of details, and stick with 3-5px brushes for most other parts (or for large swathes of grass, use 10-15px brushes to save time.)


Flower painting
Painting the flowers uses the same ideas as painting the branches, except the flowers have no black edge on them. Start by painting from the center outwards. Since the branch painting steps already created an overlap, paint over the branch to create a nice crisp edge for the flowers. For the flower petals I used a 3-4px brush, and for the flower pistils/stamens, I used a 2px brush. For flower stems, I used a 1-2px brush.


Tree painting
Painting the tree is similar to painting the branches. Where branch texture tends to go in one direction, however, the trunk of the tree has textures going in all directions. When painting a section like a tree trunk, always keep in mind which direction your brush strokes should go in to maintain a good edge and transition between colors.


Painting the girl
Painting the girl is just like painting the rest of the wall. However, the girl has the most details, so you'll want to be very careful with edges and corners. This is about the only place where I used the 1px brush extensively.


Done!
Keep painting and painting and eventually you'll finish!
You might notice that I redid the grass on the left side of this screenshot compared to the Painter prep screenshot. After watercoloring the grass, the scan extension didn't mesh well with the scan, so went back and added more details, more gaps in the shadows, and more variations in the green. I thought I could be lazy, but that didn't work out.


Post-Production
After I finished watercoloring, I saved it as a bitmap again and opened it up in Photoshop for post-production. This involved some color and level adjustment (I toned down the saturation of the image and skewed it towards pink) and adding some extra watercolor texture (so that even the white areas show texture, as you might expect from seeing a watercolor on paper), and added some text (which took a while to figure out.) Then you're ready to export as jpegs and post it for all to see.

Well, that's one way you can create a wallpaper that looks like it was watercolored. Hope you learned something along the way, or at least had fun seeing how this wall was put together.

1 new wallpaper (Takamichi - Under the Sakura)

1 new wallpaper:
Takamichi - Under the Sakura (Painted/Scenic)

My entry for Paint-o-Rama's "Let there be Light" contest. Yes, it's loli-tastic. I dedicate it to Osi just because of that. Actually, I chose the scan because I decided to go for the "light filtered through trees" sort of lighting, and because it had a nice spring theme to it... [more]

Ramblings on Mushishi: Mata Itsuka

NOTE: I just found this half-finished entry in my "potential blog topics" Google Notebook when I was doing some testing during work, so I decided to finish and post it, no matter how late it is.

One of the motivations behind turning my recent Mushishi wall, Mata Itsuka, from a vector-only wall (like Oyako) to a painted wall was to gain more familiarity with Corel Painter 9. I've had Painter for years (although only upgraded to 9 last year) but have only used it extensively for a few wallpapers. Frankly, having no experience in natural media aside from pencil/pen and paper, the number of options overwhelms me, and I have no basis for understanding how the oil-based brushes are supposed to work compared to, say, oil pastels. Still, a painting-based wall was just the excuse necessary to get more practice!
The last wall I used Painter on was the Okama Hunter in the Grass wall where I used the digital watercolor brushes to create a textured background. I went back to the digital watercolor tools (not to be confused with Painter's watercolor tools which is an entirely different palette) because I liked how they maintained the paper texture, and because I like the watercolor look in general.
One of the first things I discovered was Painter's custom brush maker. This thing is about 25x more complicated than Photoshop's custom brush maker and about 50x as fun, because you can actively preview the brush while you're making it but before committing to the changes. Very slick. I wasted probably several hours just messing around with controls, although in the end I created a new digital watercolor brush quite similar to the presets but with more control over the brush size based on tablet pressure and a fixed opacity (the presets were switched in pressure control on size/opacity).
Basically, I began by painting the base color for Ginko's face, then adding successive layers of shadow and highlights. I painted way outside of the outlines as I planned to mask the final color layers in Photoshop. After several frustrating attempts to figure out how to use the digital watercolor blenders, I gave up and decided to use the regular set of blenders. However, in Painter, you have to 'dry' any liquid ink layer (such as digital watercolor) before you can use the "dry" brushes (which include blenders, oils, etc.) Afterwards, though, the regular blenders were most intuitive to use and everything went from a sorta cel-style shading to a much softer gradient-style shading.
I like Painter's blenders a lot, and plan to use them in many more painty walls.

Tutorial: Painting "Mountain's Red Leaves"

Here is the tutorial segment of my Hakkenden "Mountain's Red Leaves" Paint-o-rama contest entry. It describes how I created the wallpaper, step by step. Click on each image thumbnail for the full screenshot.

Step 0: Preparing the Image
I found the scan of Hakkenden from AnimePaper and decided to use it for my wallpaper. However, to make a wallpaper I had to extend the image horizontally to fit the widescreen format. This was achieved in Illustrator, using fairly simple paths to define the shape of the trees, and then applying several effects of roughen and twist at low levels to create the jaggy edges that defined the leaves. The image was then exported to Photoshop at 200% size where some texture was added.


Step 1: Base Layer
I created a new blank canvas in Painter, and then opened my prepped image, setting this as the clone source. With a very large watercolor brush I basically filled the canvas with color. At this stage it wasn't very important to get all the details right - just make sure the canvas is covered. This fills the large areas (like the orange sky and the darkest layer of trees) quickly and easily.
It's useful to have a copy of the original as the top layer in your file, set at a low transparency. Although you can use 'tracing paper' to see a semi-transparent version of your clone file, you don't have any control over it. Having it as a layer means you can show or hide at will, change the transparency levels, etc, so it's easy to see what you're cloning from.


Step 2: Start adding details
Using a smaller brush (half the size of the first brush) I began to more closely define the edges. I don't repaint the entire image, just the edges. Note that in using the watercolor option in Painter you get white halos around the brush. Be sure to have plenty of extra space at your edges, so you can easily remove them with a soft eraser when you are finished.


Step 3: Second verse, same as the first
Continue as before using yet a smaller brush. Also, be sure to lock your previous layers, as it will prevent you from painting over a finished layer.


Step 4: Small enough for details?
When you get down to 8px you can actually define all the details at the edges. In this step I used not only 8px brushes but also 4px and 2px for especially detailed areas (the area around the geisha, and the bridge, for the most part.)


Step 5: Blend it all together
After the watercolor portion is done, you'll want to erase those halos I mentioned earlier. I did that in Photoshop (because I could select the layer's transparency and use a feathered mask on the layer.) Afterwards all of the layers were merged. The canvas was also extended ~50px in all directions and the color cloned at the top. This is because when you use the blender tools in Painter, it pulls an average color of what is beneath your brush - and at the edges of the canvas, it pulls in white, giving you a bad frame effect.
Like before, use a large blender for expediency, and smaller blenders when you're painting around the edges. Below is a typical workflow:
Step 5a: (the before shot)
Here is the edge of a tree, before anything is done.


Step 5b: Blending the edges
First, using a small (6px) blender, define the edges of the tree. Since all the trees have scalloped edges, make sure your brush stroke is in the same type of semi-circle. Also, by going slightly beyond the edge of the tree, you'll pull in the lighter color behind it. This gives the edges a bit of glow and adds depth.


Step 5c: Filling the interior
Using a larger (12px) blender, fill in the rest of the tree. This technique could also be useful in painting clouds, as they have the same scallop edges and lighting emphasis.


After the blending step, there were some final post-production steps in Photoshop - cropping the extra pixels out from step 5, adding a hint of texture to emphasize the painting style, text (a haiku from Issa), and final colors and levels adjustment. Finally, add your signature and post it on your website!