Stage 11 – Clean Up and Details
More cleaning up, polishing and adjusting.  I go back in and push the shadows and highlights on the body a bit more, I repaint some of the hair and play around with the darkness of all of the figure’s line.  I also remove some ink lines here and there, especially where the brightest highlights are striking the subject, such as on the loincloth, the leg wrappings, tips of the hair, the g-string jewels and the belly.  I want the shape to be defined by the line and the paint, but also by the lack of line.

With the line adjusted to a lower over all opacity, I have to worry about the way the grays and the lines combine in multiply mode.  In Photoshop, I select the lines of the ink layer (CTL-ALT-Tilde) and reverse the selection.  Now that I am working only within the lines, I hide the selection and begin to use a soft brush and the eraser to either add or remove gray paint from behind the lines.  The more paint behind the line, the blacker the line, the less paint the lighter the line will appear.  I leave the lines darkest in the shadow areas and lightest where there are highlights.

I redraw and paint the knife handle yet again.

I also layer in a flat version of the body paints, but I’m not quite happy with it yet.

Stage 12 – Color Choices and Adjustments
At this point it’s all Photoshop work.  If I want to rework the gray under painting I duplicate the gray layers to a new doc and bring that into Painter to do the work, then bring them back into the main Photoshop document when finished.  This is because I begin using some Photoshop adjustment layers in this stage and they are not supported in Painter.

I begin layering in the colors.  In Photoshop I make a new Layer Set above everything (all grays are in one set, loincloth inks and grays in another, pencils in another, etc) called color and make a new layer for each new color that I add.  I begin with the skin tones.  I make a layer called skin and select a nice skin shade.  Using the Pencil tool I paint in the color over all the skin.  I don’t worry too much about keeping in the lines, but I have to make sure that the lines get covered as well, as they are no longer completely black.  When the layer is then set to Color Mode, the skin color layer combines with the grays underneath it, using the hue of the color layer but the tone of grays underneath to create a final composite. Anything white (i.e the background) will not show color.  I adjust the opacity of the layer to taste, which changes the intensity of the hue.  I can also select a color layer and Image/Adjust/Hue-Saturation to try new colors on the fly.  I do this for each color until I am happy with how they all work together.

Once that is complete, I may decide to adjust some grays to lighten or darken sections.  This is easy to do with the color layers in place.  I CTL-Click a color layer to select its content (and because the colors are flat, the result is a simple bitmap mask) and then use an adjustment layer (Exm: Levels) to adjust the darkness of that element on the gray layer.  For this stage I’ve played around with the darkness of the hair, the loincloth and the arm wrapping.  I leave these adjustment layers intact so that I can change my mind later in one simple click.

Stage 13 – Shadow and Highlight Gradient Maps
Once the basic colors are in I add a few dynamic Adjustment Layers to tie everything together. 

First I create a Gradient Map layer over everything with a dark blue at one end and neutral gray (128, 128, 128) on the other and set the layer to Color (Overlay is also a valid setting).  This essentially adds a blue cast to all the shadows of the image, that lessens as the shadows turn to mid tones and disappears in the highlights.  This is similar to the traditional technique of adding a color wash with watercolors.  I play with the opacity of the layer until I get the effect I like.  This one step goes along way it tying all the colors together.

Second, I create another Gradient Map Layer over this one and do the opposite.  For this one, I use a nice sunlight color at one end of the spectrum and neutral gray at the other end, but reverse the gradient and set it to Overlay.  Now there is a nice subtle sunlight tint to the highlights that fades by the time it reaches the mid-tones.  I play with the gradients and their midpoints to get the effect I want.

I go back in again and remove more ink lines to accentuate the forms of the hair and the hair wrappings.

(Note that there is a bug in all versions of Photoshop’s Gradient Map feature that does not allow it to work properly with a gradient that fades to transparency.  Try to get the same effect as above with the "color to transparency" gradient mode yourself and you’ll see the result is instead a  flat color applied over the entire image.  When set to a mode such as Color or Overlay, the neutral gray (128,128,128) acts as transparency, so you can achieve the same effect with a work around by making gradients that fade to neutral gray and using an appropriate blending mode.)

Stage 14 - New Body Paint & Adjustments
I decided I wanted the body paint to look more like a liquid, in this case blood, smeared on the flesh, so I redid them.  I made a gray work file and took it into Painter.  Then I used the Liquid Ink brushes to create the look of smeared blood.  These brushes are a dynamic liquid layer, similar to Painter’s dynamic Watercolor layers, that allows the artist to not only paint with brush like strokes, but allows the resulting virtual paint to be smeared, moved around, mixed and erased with special brushes.  I brought the results back into Photoshop as a multiply layer, selected the pixels of the paint effects and painted into them with a soft airbrush and/or the eraser to create their variation in tone.

I also decided to add some blood spray splatter effects to the figure’s body.  For this I used a course, spattered airbrush in Painter, then went back and erased some of the spray to make it appear that it only hit parts of her body, in three dimensions.

Both of these effects were done in gray and colored later in photoshop.  To quickly color the peppered blood spray, I CTL-Click on the spray layer to only select the blood droplets, then drop fill a blood red into a blank layer and set it Color. 

Stage 15 – Final Touches
As I was working on this piece I thought it could possibly use something in the background, and I liked the idea of using a graphical effect such as a blood spray to highlight the movement of the blood across the girl.  I thought about making some custom brushes in Photoshop, but instead decided to pull out some old scans of India Ink that I had created and scanned when I was working on Soul Chaser Betty.  The blood effects were created by dripping and blowing India Ink onto Bristol board in a variety of splatters and then scanning the results in.  These were adjusted to bitmaps and used to collage together a graphic blood spatter in the background, with the opacity reduced.  These had to be cleaned up as the original scans were small.  They were intended for comic art, not to be blown up to full canvas size, and got a little pixely in the process.  By selecting the flat blood grays, using the Select/Modify/Smooth effect and drop filling into the resulting selection on a new layer, they became nice, smooth background elements.  Finally, they were colored with the same color as the rest of the blood. 

Unfortunately I had not intended to have anything behind the figure, so I had to then go in and clean up and mask a lot of the edges (on Gray and Color layers) to make sure that none of the foreground elements accidentally colored or obscured the new background.  Fortunately, because I paint all foreground elements in solid grays onto a transparent canvass, the figure was already a fairly isolated image.

Finally, I had to go in and do a final clean up pass, finding areas where sloppy coloring or painting had to be fixed or cleaned, before signing the picture and calling it done.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you got some ideas to apply to your own work.  If you have any tips for me, drop me a line (see email button in left column).

BMAN