Every Picture Can Potentially Tell a Lie Part III

Just wanted to finish up with the "final" digital painting finish. Total time spent was only 7 hours which in all honesty is barely sufficient, but this was just meant to be a brief demo and vent session for myself and my raging pregnancy hormones! As far as cheating digital artists go, there is also another sneaky trick I have seen employed as well! Using the clone tool set to a "fany schmancy" brush curser, I have seen artist have two images open on their screen, one of the "photograph" they are "painting" and the other of the line drawing sketch they did.

They set the curser to clone over the photograph and use the strokes they are making with their curser on that photograph to paint on top of their "sketch". Which is essentially no different than smudging the "below" photograph onto a top layer using the "sample all layers" choice! 

Well I stop my venting for now and continue on showing my own method for digital painting, which is all hand-done! No cheap tricks here!

This is the final image (followed by the steps):

My horse Crush when he was just 5 years old:

Below is a close up of the head. Remember I duplicated all the folders and then merged the horse folder copy with the horse detail folder copy. This created a single layer of all the "horse layers" combined. I then deplicated this layer so I have "two". Just in case I mess one up!

Below is the same image as above except the "finishing" layer was turned off. So you can see the "roughness".

Below again, is the same image but with the "finishing layer" turned back on.

The image below has the feet detail layer made visible, the finishing layer made visible, the background finish layer made visible, and the horse layer copy 2 made visible. Also notice that the layer has a drop shadow and inner shadow filter applied to the later at a very low % of opacity and set to mulitply, just for added depth.

The finished piece with the backgroun folder turned on so we can how it all works together!

Enjoy!