Hey everybody I just opened up my store with some of my personal artworks at zazzle.com, and all promotion would be very much appreciated! Soon, I will be sharing some different illustrations in cards. So please check out some of the ornaments and greeting cards among other Post card ideas. You can view and/or purchase my other illustrations at zazzle.com on my store Gallery.

In this tutorial we are going to work on a still life painting. Painting still life is a great way to practice shading and color blending. You can have a apple photograph if you want…working from a photo is fine, you will get truer shades and reflections from real life. Though I’ll be coloring with a apple fruit sketch, you can apply skills from this tutorial to any digital still life coloring projects that you want .

Tutorial Details

* Program: Adobe Photoshop

* Wacom Graphire 3 USB (Blue)

* Difficulty: Intermediate

* Completion Time: 1-3 hours

Note: I’m using Adobe Photoshop. But if you wish…you can use the other tools like..Corel Draw etc.

* Source files for this tutorial are available.

Preview of Final Results

Download the PSD

Step 1: My tutorial assumes that you have a basic knowledge of how Adobe Photoshop functions as in basic brushing. They say “digital painting is much easier with a tablet than mouse” I really agree with this because I was using mouse when I start to learn Adobe Photoshop digital painting. Now…here we go….first of all let‘s  open a new document (approximately 700wide and 810 high, around 100 dpi resolution) and make a preliminary sketch.  (Ctrl+N or File > New). For now it is in 72dpi, but after changing the resolution to 300dpi (without re-sampling image) you can able to print it on A3 format in pretty good quality

* Width: 700px

* Height: 810px

* Resolution: 100.

Step 5: Adobe Photoshop is a wonderful program with great advances in its brush engine.  For this tutorial I use primarily one brush and below are the steps used to create it. I click on the Brush Tool (B) and choose a very thin, hard brush.  As you know, soft brushes are the blurry ones and hard brushes are more solid.

Step 3: Open the Brushes Palette (F5). Opacity jitter should be set to pressure, only effective if you have a pressure sensitive tablet. Brush Tip Shape – Set your spacing low, I use 7% here. Flow – On the brush tool bar set your flow to a low setting like I did.

Step 4: The very first step of this tutorial is to draw the base sketches for the main idea. Drawing sketch is esseniton for every creative process. For the sketch file, please download the rar file. Here as you see in your tutorial file,  I am giving you the simple sketch  which I have draw  in Adobe Photoshop. Okay after , download my apple sketch psd file you are ready to paint the fruit.

Step 5: After finishing the the sketch, I  set the sketch layer to “multiply”. I lock my sketch layer. And however, my tutorial won’t show you how to draw the sketch..but will teach you how to paint the sketch of a still life.

Step 6: After arranging the sketch let’s choose our color palette.  Here, these  are my colours selections. The very first step is to choose right colors  for our still life painting.  Don’t get into thinking in classical colors.  You can change the main colors even to orange and yellow, with a whole lot of green. “Green” apples can be mostly yellow. Or weirdly purple. Or… you decide. I mean, it’s your picture and you can do what you want. J On the finished result as you noticed my apples are not classical red colored apples. Look at my finished still life illustration What colors did you notice?

Step 7: Now, make sure you have your light source defined to have realistic shading. Set the sketch layer to “Multiply” mode.Then create a new layer then name it as Apple coloring. This new layer will be our blocking color layer. Choose a large brush and began to paint.Decide where the shadows/whater will be… Now we’re ready to paint..  Make sure the color layer selected not the sketch.

Step 8: Use the large brush to do some general shading for the overall shape.. or we can color the layer with one of the selection tools.  In the toolbox, select the Polygonal Lasso tool. With this tool make a sample apple selection like I did. Then fill it with the Paint Bucket Tool.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at 08:36 and is filed under Adobe Photoshop, Digital Painting, Drawing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.