Making of The Blues Singer Leaves Town

This picture was done in a hot summer day, in the memory of an old anime series I used to watch as a kid, about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Historically, it’s off from that period, but it’s the feeling of summer, childhood fascination and nature that I wanted to re-create. It’s also a tribute to music.

The picture was done to resemble an animation still, cel-shaded characters over a “traditionally” painted background. I tried to do this digitally, using colour as if I were working with watercolours. I worked in Photoshop CS2, at approximately 3000 x 812 pixels. Could have been bigger, but my home pc isn’t so powerful.

For inspiration, I also had an open book with Oga Kazuo’s work. He’s the most brilliant nature painter and animation background artist I know.

I started out by sketching the background. I used a 100% black, round, hard-edged, variable width (set to pressure) brush – the Photoshop standard, at low-opacity (less than 20%) and the size of 10-20 pixels.


I sketched in a separate transparent layer. The reason I always sketch like this - with black, or with another colour, but in a transparent layer instead of setting it to multiply - because this way I have real transparency and total control on how the lines blend. If I don’t want to use multiply, I don’t have to. When your lines are set to “normal” blending mode, it’s much easier to do whatever you like with them, like changing their colour, luminosity, and transparency, although, for what I’m using the sketch for, it doesn’t really matter.


By then, I didn’t have a clear idea of how the final image would be, how many characters and where I’d place them. But I started to lay out things in a way that I could decide later. I sketched quite loosely, and ended up with this:



I was satisfied at this point, even though it’s still rough and not very pretty. But since I was planning of rendering and detailing with colours, I felt it was enough.

I started to put down colours. I worked from light to dark, like working with watercolours. I put down a really bright and saturated yellow, to where the sun would shine so bright it was almost white. For the road I went with an orange, and I left much of the white showing through, to give the same bright sunny impression.
I also did the sky gradient. It’s easy to have a clear idea of how you want the blue for your sky. By applying it right at the start, you have a nice reference, in terms of tone, brightness and saturation, with which you can compare all the other colours to.



To put down these colours, I was pretty careless with the brushes I used, which isn’t good. I’d like to work as closely to natural media as I can, and with natural media you have to be careful and delicate at every step. I went pretty rough and ugly here, so it doesn’t really matter which random brushes I picked. It’s pretty bleh. But it’s important to mention I used mostly low to medium opacity, like washes of watered down paint, until I got the concentration I wanted.

If you use a colour picker, you’ll see most of my greens, especially in the grass and the sun-lit vegetation, are in the yellow range. 


This is because as go you towards more blue greens, if you use them saturated for plants, they will look very electric, and artificial in a sunny scene like this.

Next, I started to block in some darker colours; deeper greens for the shaded vegetation, and a greenish brown for the tree shadows on the ground. Why a greenish brown, if I started with orange for the lit part? Because the green leaves are casting the shadow, and since they’re not completely opaque, they cast a green tint.



For the background, I first painted what would be the colours of the most distant visible objects. I painted a blue silhouette of the distant plane. On this blue, I applied transparent layers of colour for the several distant objects. I picked very de-saturated colours (as colours get less saturated and contrasting with distance). As these mix with the blue, they gain a blue tint, which happens in clear days to objects at large distances. That’s aerial perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_perspective


For rendering the grass, I used brushes with “bristles” with pretty high (but pressure-variable) opacity, and then I jumped in with the round, variable-width brush for some individual strands.


As I paint, I often switch the lines layer on and off, bearing in mind that the final image will have no lines, in this case. I was getting to the point I didn’t need the lines much of the time. I added some clouds and overall detail.



Then I started working on the characters. I first decided how many they would be and where they would stand, and I sketched them very roughly, with the same brush I used for the background. Of course, I made the colour layer invisible so I could see well. 



When I was satisfied with the scribbles, I drew the clean character line art in a layer on top. I used a very thin (4 or 5 pixels), 100% black, variable width brush. I know at this resolution, it is stretching the line a bit, since when I was drawing I could see pixels, but it was still manageable. 



Then, came the colours, in a new layer below. First I painted them as if they were totally in the shadow (except for the girl who is completely in the sun). For this, I used very little contrast for the little shading I did. Then, I added the parts where the sun shines on them through the leaves. I used very bright, more yellow and more saturated colours.

In the end, I added another layer, to enhance the lighting effects. I wanted to give it that fresh, extra flare from sunlight. So, I picked an almost white yellow, and in a new top layer, I used the airbrush on the brightest spots to do the flare. Some of these spots were white already, so they wouldn’t give out a yellow flare. For these areas, like the white shirts, for instance, it’s best to use white. I also painted some rays coming from between the trees. You can see the difference  this layer does in the animated GIF. I don’t use many layers when I paint. I do create lots of layers during the process, and it would take forever to explain every little time I used a new layer, but I usually soon collapse them into the colour layer. I could do the full colours in 2 layers. But I do keep this structure, usually: - Extra effects over the lines (like the light flares) - Extra rendering over the lines - Lines - Colours  Here, since I have animation-style characters, I ended up with this:  - Extra effects - Character lines - Character colours - Character sketches (hidden in the final image) - Background lines (the sketch, hidden in the final image) - Colours - A white layer, for when I’m sketching And that’s all! Here’s the final picture: I was pretty happy with the final result, and while I rushed some stages of the painting, it came close to what I envisioned. Hope the tutorial was useful, you can mail me if you have any questions: luis.m.melon@gmail.com