Digital Painting Photoshop Tutorial: One Year As A Lion
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After completing my first two designs for team Assault, Tim asked if I’d like to make a tutorial providing some insight into my design process.
Generally speaking I always try to work from general to specific. I also find that for each design, the process is unique. Some designers feel that thumbnails are always useful, some designers feel that just going at it, throwing pieces together and working out the design solutions on the canvass is the best method.
To be honest I do not prefer any standard methodology over another, the only consistent philosophies I try to abide by while working include, working general to specific, maintaining focus on what works for THIS design–don’t hold anything precious, and last but certainly not least, don’t be afraid to try something new!
For the “One Year As A Lion” design I already had a strong image in my head of what I wanted and a fairly certain approach laid out before I began, so lets get into it.
Gather source images
The first step in the actual production process is to search and gather images which I think could be useful. I’ll use ANY resource available, google, flickr, magazines, old sketches, ANYTHING.
When I was living in Amsterdam, taking the train to work, they would hand out free newspapers to passengers. As the papers were in Dutch I couldn’t read the articles, but i took the papers anyway and during my ride I would look through the images for anything that MIGHT be useful in the future. At the end of each month I’d scan all the clippings in that I had accumulated, and save them in a PSD file of reference material.
For this design I knew I wanted a man/lion figure standing out among a sea of sheep. I wanted the lion to be the only source of light as well as the sheep to resemble rocks of a cliff. I searched for sheep, sheep flocks, goats, lions, orangutans, (for fur) clouds/storm clouds/ash plumes, (all for rock like imagery to accompany the sheep) bodybuilders, (for the lion man’s base) barcodes, and skeletons.
As you can see in this image I’ve gathered and extracted various masses of sheep. At this stage we aren’t concerned with color, brightness, contrast or levels. Remember, we’re working general to specific, once we lay in the base of the image we can then work more specifically, tweaking when necessary.
From general to specific
The lion man is a good example of finding anything you think could work to your advantage and going with it. Here is an image of two different body builders, a random hand, two different lion’s manes and even some orangutan fur to fill out the mane further. None of the images have the same colors, tonal values or contrast. At this point, even the seams between the different images are clearly noticeable. Again, all acceptable at this “block in” stage.
Here the lion man has come a little further, now with both arms and a leg. Where pieces didn’t line up enough i painted in a make-shift base. The further we go, the more layers we build up, the less noticeable the seams between the various pieces will become.
Combining the elements in gray scale
Here we have the lion man with his flock. I’ve gone ahead and desaturated the image so that I could focus on unifying the values to bring the individual pieces together more.
After using several adjustment layers, including: “levels,” and “brightness/contrast”, to even out the values I began painting in areas that needed more visual information before going any further with any additional layers.
Here I’ve addressed all the seams, I’ve added to and unified highlights and shadows and I’ve slightly altered the outreaching hand.
I’ve knocked back the brightness and added a layer of cloud imagery I’ve meshed together with the sheep layer. I’ve began to bring out a focal point and focus on building up the light source. This was accomplished by fading the edges of the flock to darkness and dodged up areas that would be closes to the light source. (his hand)
I’ve also adjusted layers of highlight and deep shadow by dodging/burning/over-painting.
Here, you can see I’ve added a flame for the light source. I’ve also adjusted the shape of his hand. Because I couldn’t find a hand “just right” for my design needs here I took a photograph of my own posed hand with my phone and then brought it into Photoshop for further manipulation. I’ve also brought in layers of hair I had assembled from images of orangutans set to multiply over the base of the lion man’s body.
I should mention that in order to streamline the design process I have a “hue/saturation” layer at the top of my layer stack in this PSD set to “0% saturation”. This way, no matter what color information a new layer or image brings in, as long a it is below this “hue/saturation” layer it will automatically show up as gray scale. This keeps me from having to individually desaturate every layer I bring in.
I’ve now began to bring in more subtle detail elements. Here I’ve added sheep skeletal information to various members of the flock including skulls, ribs, and spines. I’ve also added to the sheep’s head in the lion man’s hand. Additionally, I’ve added in bar code elements to the back of several sheep’s heads, a subtle detail.
From my original mental image of this design, I knew that the final design would be a layered “posterized” look. I felt this would best add to the element of ambiguity in the flock. I believed this would also aid in bringing together the sheep and cloud elements.
Having had this in mind, I added another adjustment layer at the top of my layer stack in the PSD, as I had done with the “hue/saturation” before. This time it was a “posterize” modifier.
Bringing it all together with detail
Now that I had all of the basic design information unified, all that was left was detail work. I wanted a hot color palette of yellows and oranges to work with an earthy palette of browns. I tried several ideas before stumbling across the right design solution for this image: I ended up using color overlays and various hue/saturation adjustments.
Finally, dejected, I decided to take a wander through my reference library of images and textures I’ve collected. It was at this point I stumbled across a sheet of brown, discolored and deteriorating paper.
I then made copy layers of this sheet which were then merged and the seams stamped out with the stamp tool. All that was left was to find the most visually pleasing layer setting, which in this case was “color burn” at 100%, a little hue/saturation tweak and bingo!
Even though I felt I had achieved the colors I wanted, something was still missing. It was still too clean. I needed a bit of grunge, a bit more granular debris. So again back to the reference library to find an appropriate overlay. This piece of paper had just the detailed dirt information I was looking for.
I set this layer to “multiply”, and knocked back the opacity and adjusted the levels so that only the darkest micro detail would show up.
And here we have my final image. I had completed my portion of the design, the base for which Tim would add his own design touches to in order to polish the piece.
The finishing touches by Tim
After receiving the final design from Stani, I decided to add a bit of the “Assault” flair to the design including some text, our hidden logo, (It’s in there I promise you) as well as some abstract splats to the lion and flames. I duplicated the entire design, and set the layer mode of the duplicate to color dodge. Next, I played with the opacity and levels to give the design more contrast, and more importantly a few less colors so we could afford to print the shirt!
What you see above is the final version of the design and you can purchase the, “One Year As A Lion” T-Shirt over at the Assault Online Store. You can also purchase Stani’s other design, the 1984 t-shirt, which we will also have a, “making of” blog post in the near future.
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About the Author
John Staniforth is the newest member of the Assault team. He resides in Atlanta, GA and works as a freelance designer. You can see more of his work at stanidesign.com Email this Author | All posts by stani
Great tutorial! Any chance we can see a tutorial on the color seperations, making it print ready? That would be RAD!
separations*
(who sucks at spelling?….THIS GUY!)
That’s a great idea David. I’ll put it in on my to do list for this upcoming week.
Although we don’t do our seperations cause we don’t print our own shirts–I’m sure I can put together something that will help.
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Outstanding tutorial
I just love Your outcome and explained parts 
[...] Digital Painting Photoshop Tutorial: One Year As A Lion [...]
[...] Digital Painting Photoshop Tutorial: One Year As A Lion [...]
wow the result is really awesome i really liked it, but one thing i noticed is the lions left arm is smaller than the right arm… ehehe
In response to: “wow the result is really awesome i really liked it, but one thing i noticed is the lions left arm is smaller than the right arm… ehehe”
Huwaw69, hey good eye! Yes his left(fire) arm is shorter than his right(goat skull) arm. Our fellow Assault team member, Candice also noticed this and Tim and I discussed it as well.
Originally when I made the image and put it on a mock up t-shirt for placement options I ran into a bit of an aesthetic problem. The hand with the fire was a little to far past the center of the t-shirt. It was one of those small things that really bothered me. It was so close to being almost dead center that I decided to go ahead and use some “artistic license” and shorten the proportion of the arm in order to center the flaming hand closer to the wearer’s center of chest/sternum. It was a personal taste sort of call and I’m happy with the end result despite having to sacrifice anatomical accuracy. Considering that it is a “lion-man”, I figured sacrificing “1005 anatomical correctness” wouldn’t hurt the design too much:)
Again, good eye and thanks for the comment!
Cheers,
Stani
In response to: “Что-то такое слышал, но не так подробно, а откуда материал брали?”
In order to respond to this inquiry as accurately as possible, I took your question and put it into the “Russian to English” translator at http://www.babelfish.yahoo.com
The translated text i got was this: “Something similar did hear, but not so it is in detail, but from where material was taken?” So i will do my best to answer this translated question, if it is inaccurate or if you can specify your question more clearly please feel free to comment again and I can take another crack at it.
From my understanding, Cederash, you are asking about more specific information regarding the texture overlays I used in the later stages of the design or you may be referring to the individual image components that are used as bases to build up the design.
Regarding the texture overlays:
There are numerous websites you can pay to gain membership to in order to download images of various materials and textures. One such great website is http://www.cgtextures.com
Also, I’ll save little pieces of scrap paper and materials and scan them into my computer to use later. I’ll also take photographs of textures, materials and stains to later be used.
Regarding the individual photographic images used in combination to make the design:
I’ll try and think before i begin of images that i’ll need, then I’ll try to further think of related images i could use as well. Once i have a variety of subjects that could be used as visual components I will go to sites like http://www.flickr.com and google.com to search for useful images.
I hope these explanations helped! Thanks for the comment/question.
Cheers,
Stani
[...] 19. One Year As A Lion. [...]
This lion won’t eat you up though it looks angry and scary…great designing and an aggressive theme to choose for a tutorial…Helpful insight on the detailing….Thanks to Stani, this post will certainly be a great help to would-be-designers….
[...] 17. One Year As A Lion. [...]