Painting in Photoshop - By Conceptoo



This tutorial will teach you how to paint your drawings using some of the basic tools available in Adobe Photoshop such as the smudge tool, brushes, the fill bucket, and lasso tool as well. You are assumed to have some basic common artistic sense on what colours to choose and where to position your shadows. We will accomplish our goal by drawing a natural scene and then gradually adding more and more details to it.

Start by creating a new canvas in Adobe Photoshop, set the width to 600px and the height to 400px. It is recommended that you set the resolution to a value higher than 300 px/inch if you intend to print your artwork upon completion. We are going to draw our artwork from scratch, so make sure that you set the background as white.

Now that you have a blank white canvas, create a new layer and name it "sketch". This layer would be used to draw the draft outlines of our painting. Pick the "Brush Tool" from the tool bar (alternatively hit "B" on your keyboard). Right-click the canvas to open the Brush Tool options. Set the diameter to 3px and set the colour as light grey.

You would now have to sketch the draft version of your painting, create the outlines of the main objects only with the minimum amount of details required to identify the main features of these objects. These outlines will be used as a guide for the later process of painting. If you are completely hopeless on how to draw a similar scene you can copy this one to proceed with the tutorial.


We'll start by adding the smallest amount of detail possible at the start. Select the "background layer" and use the "Bucket tool" to colour it in sky blue (# 76B0F0).

That's done, create a new layer and name it "mountain_1", position the new layer below the layer "sketch". (Naming your layers is extremely helpful as your projects grow bigger, make it a habit!). We will now start colouring a single mountain without putting much detail at the start. We will use the Magnetic Lasso Tool to select the area to paint and then fill it with our chosen colour. Pick the Magnetic Lasso Tool from the Tools Panel (It is located under the Normal Lasso Tool) and slowly select the main mountain.

Set the foreground colour as # 8797CA and then use the Fill command that is found under "Edit" to get the result seen at image below.

The body of our mountain is now coloured, we will gradually add more details to it starting from the top and ending at the bottom of the mountain. We will start by colouring the upper part in white. To avoid any unintentional colouring of the objects outside the mountain, lock the transparency of the layer. This could be done through the Layer panel.

Now pick the "Brush Tool" again and this time set the colour to white. Right-click the canvas and choose the 9px stroke. Then start colouring the mountain top, you might want to zoom in (Hit "Z" on your keyboard) to have a better view. You do not have to exactly follow the original drawing as we are going to smudge this.

It is now time to add more details to our mountain, the key tool that we'll use do this is the "Smudge Tool" ("R" on your keyboard). The smudge tool will enable us to soften the edges and make them blend with the rest of the mountain. Pick the smudge tool and right-click the canvas to select 9px hard round stroke for it. You can alter the strength of your smudge from the options menu above. We have used a 50% strength smudge for our example, a greater strength will pull more colour along with each stroke, while a lower strength percentage will pull less.

I suggest that you press and hold your mouse click at the centre of the white area and start pulling down in a curvy shape, repeat the process by starting from the same point above and going into a slightly different direction. You might be required to go over the same path a couple of times to get your desired shape, essentially this is a matter of style and you can on smudging until you get your desired image according to your vision of how the mountain should look. Do not rush this stage and make sure you spend all the time you need because you will only develop your smudge skills by exercise.

It is now time to add detail to the rest of the body of the mountain. We will use a darker shade of the original blue colour that we used for the body of the mountain. Use the colour # 7380AA to paint over the shaded areas of the mountain and after you are done with all the shadows, use the colour # A8BBFD to add a lighter shade to to all the the various parts in the mountain as shown in the image below.

It is time to use the smudge tool once more. This time the job is a bit much more interesting as we have two colours that we will use to illustrate textures on the mountain, try to put the lighter shades in one direction and the darker shades in the other direction as seen in the image below. You might want to also try using the "Finger Painting" option (found in the option bar above the window while using the smudge tool) to add some white colour to the lighter side or maybe some black colour to the darker side. Again, take your time, and use the Undo command (Ctrl+Z) if you do something wrong.



Our first mountain is now complete, you will have to repeat the whole process once again for the two mountains in the background. Start off by creating a new layer named "mountain_2" and place it under our first mountain layer. You should get something similar to our result down here.

The last element to add to our digital painting today are the clouds. Create a new layer and name it "clouds". We will use the normal lasso tool to select a bubble like area in the sky, fill this area with a white colour and then use the smudge tool to soften the outsides of it. Use a combination of different sizes of the smudge stroke to achieve a more realistic and interesting look for the clouds.

This concludes our tutorial, we hope that you learnt something new about how to paint your drawings using brushes and the smudge tool.