Oil Painting look with the Smudge tool in Photoshop CS3.

Transcription

1 Oil Painting look with the Smudge tool in Photoshop CS3. This tutorial is mostly free to experiment and you don't have to follow every little thing to the letter. I never had, so why force you to. I do however, add my little opinions and things to look for while working on the piece as I write this. 1) Open the image you want to work with, and fix any photo related things before moving on. (Contrast/brightness, color, whatever) Also, this is a good time to think about you background. If you don't like it, change it with a gradient or fill or whatever you wish :D, for me, I'm changing it to a gradient.) 2) Okay, I have my image ready to go, and I have made my background on a new layer below the flower. Now it's time to get a watercolor filter on the two layers to get ready to start painting.

2 3) The watercolor filter will soften the image for us to work with. What you want to look for is some splotchiness in the flower. In the filter settings it has Brush detail, shadow intensity, and texture. We only want to look at how the Brush Detail effects our image, so make sure the other two settings are at zero. Now it's just testing the slider and looking at the preview window. I like the zero setting more. So I go ahead with that. Now, this is just a preference call, but I used the water color at the same setting twice on the image and got a better result the second time, if you want to as well, go for it, but if not you don't have to. It's again, whatever you want. You can even put the background through the filter or some other filter if you like. I decide not to after trying a few different filters.

3 <- Going through the watercolor filter once <-Going through the watercolor filter twice

4 * Oh, I suppose I should of said this earlier, I make TONS of layers, so to me, I make each step a new layer or sets of layers by duplicating the image after a major change. I tend to make icky mistakes or I just might like to see the before and after an effect or brush stroke. So, if you think you can manage without tons of layers, then do so. 4) Yea, paint time. So get out you Smudge tool (short cut: R, which does smudge, blur, and sharpen) In the tool bar menu (found below the Main menu) Set your brush to strength to 100% and click the box for Finger Painting if it's not clicked already. The brush I am using is from the set called Wacom 3, and it's the first brush. Go into the Brush settings and select the other dynamics and make sure the strength jitter is set to pen pressure if it's not already so. And start brushing :D. I suggest that when you brush, try to follow the strokes that is most natural. For instance, the flower petals go from the center out, so you would brush them the same way. I'm more of an expressive painter, so my strokes can get a little crazy sometimes, but I tend to follow the "flow" of the image. Also, with the smudge tool, I found it best works by working from the edge to center, or going from one direction to the other. center. <-The starting to apply the smudge tool to the 5) Just work your way around and change the size of the brush if you need to. I leave the really big size for the background and tend to work med-small to smaller for the base painting. Later we'll get into detailing if you want to follow afterwards. It requires a bit more artistic eye/view point in placing highlights, add in shadows, or whatever.

5 <-Petals done. 6) After working with the center, I more onto the petals, working from where the petals meet the center outwards. Once that's done, it's the greens turn. background. <-Green stalk and leaves done, now it's just the

6 7) Time to play around with the background. Now this is where it cause timely, not that it's hard or anything. What I mean is that Photoshop tends to have to think a little more with the smudge tool and so it you blow it up really big and stroke like a gazillion really fast strokes, it lags so you can actually watch your strokes. Anyways, I just start off by trying to get my colors in the background to smudge together and it starts to look like a tie dye effect. Afterwards I work smaller to get it the way I want. 8) Flatten your painted image to you background to fix the funny edges on the flower that are standing out and smudge them. I really suggest you make a copy BEFORE flattening, just in case you want to work on this after.

7 9) Now you're done...unless you make to make this even BETTER by adding some missing highlights. For that, I add a layer and brush in lightly/quickly with just a regular round brush with pen pressure opacity.

8 The reason I add a layer here is because I don't want any of the other colors interfering with my white. <-brushing in highlights.

9 <-Now done. Officially.