The process of illustrating the Spider Lake Road image for my book Spider Lake.

How I illustrate

The process of creating an image.

Okay, so yesterday I was painting in oils until two pm. I had an idea to illustrate a scene in my book Spider Lake; http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CL0QPW4 and I thought I would show how it is I create the imagery. This is generally the same way I start a painting.

My years of experience in the retouching industry had me doing all sorts of crazy things. "Can you put this dress on this image of a girl and make it look real?" "Can you extend this image of the room, creating the leather couch in perspective? Oh, and could you build a wall here and place a painting on the wall?" Working for ten years on Conde'Nast's flagship magazines including Vanity Fair had me doing all sorts of crazy things, and I was the lead man. I had the best set of skills in a room full of gifted artists.

I know, this is really brash, and I shouldn't be so full of myself. My answer to that would be to say; I am trying to sell my advanced skills to anyone who may need them. I have never been an egotist, but I have always been competitive. I don't like being second best. That being said, let's see how I approach my illustration. One final note before I begin. I use images from the internet. There are copyright issues that must be followed. When I make something for painting reference, what I end up with is derivative and adjusted, pulled, stretched, assembled, that the originals are obscured forever. They are placed through the Gregg Hangebrauck filter so to speak, and I would never use someone's imagery in it's original form. Even the image I am showing you today would eventually be painted, causing even higher levels of originality.

Here we go; Find the files that fit your original vision.

When I think of an image, it is already composed in my head. When I wrote the passage in my novel, I had the same image rattling around in there, so it was just a matter of going looking for the elements. The image below is filtered with distortion to obscure the original imagery, my apologies; but you can see where I am going with it.

Now let's put it together

In Photoshop, you have to think of the layers as a deck of cards. The background image being on bottom, and each new element being above as it moves forward in the image. All Photoshop pros know this. This extra info is for any novices out there. So, I begin with the background image, and work my way up. The following progression of images will pause whenever explanation is needed.

As you can see in this progression of layers, the original background on the left is the first layer. The middle image is the two layers; one and two, and I grained up the roadway I added so the asphalt would look like gravel ( as in the book ). The third file on the right has the lightning added ( I know, it is hard to see ) The lightning layer ( layer three ) is in ( overlay ) form in the layers palette. This darkens and lightens the layers below with the tone of layer three. ( see the palette image layer three and you will notice it looks very different in it's original form. )

A word about masking

Photography is a limited media. The dynamic range that a camera can produce is about a third of what the human eye can process. Many photographers take pictures all their life without knowing this. When you go out and photograph a landscape, and your camera is metering on the trees and grass, the sky the camera produces on the film ( or chip ) becomes lighter than your eye actually sees it. The same is true for the tone in the deep shadows. Your eye sees all the detail that the limited camera leaves out. Some recent techniques allow for that with the bracketing of exposure and the subsequent marrying of the three exposures digitally ( a topic for another time ). The limitations of the camera often allow the post-manipulating Photoshop guy to get an easy mask. The two images below show how I often produce my masks.

The green color on the image is simply the Quick mask color. The menu on the right shows how the mask is produced using select/color range and setting the Selection preview to quick mask. I like the place I sample to turn green ( not the opposite ) so the program needs to be set up how I like it first.

Lets add a few more layers

Layer four ( left image ) is done by applying a dark purple tint to the mask of all but the sky. This layer is changed from normal to ( multiply ) in the layers palette. The middle image which is five layers combined, adds the fiery sky within the sky mask. The third image is the lightning copied and pasted using the same masking technique as the sky.

A little trickery with the cupola

The image of the cupola needed to be bent to appear to be more at eye level. If the original file ( left ) were placed as is, the viewer would notice something wrong. The human eye and mind know when things look right ( or wrong ) and this type of thing comes up all the time in high-end photo manipulation. A chair added to a room scene needs to be at precise angles to marry correctly, even down to the proper photo length of the lens. ( An image shot at 50mm looks very different than one shot at 85mm. ) The trickery here is simple manipulation using filter/liquify.

Lets look at three more layers

The image on the left has the menacing cloud added ( once again, using select/color range ) and it is copied and pasted into a new layer. The layer is once again changed from normal mode to multiply which mimics a transparent film being laid on another. The next two images are fairly obvious, the cupola being placed, color corrected to match the dark hues of the background, and the tree layer handled the same.

Lets add some bent up cars

Okay, the next few layers are also handled as the cupola and the tree. Copy them in, color correct them ( using curves ) and placing them correctly in the image. The hard part of this iis knowing what images will work in the perspective of the design. The images you choose must be photographed at relatively the same lens height above the ground, and at a close focal length. A trained eye can see what would work, but a novice might have problems. The image on the right has an added layer with airbrushed shadows. I use a Wacom tablet and hand brush any shadows needed. ( just like airbrushing )

The finishing touches

In the final image, I add the cracked glass image to all the windows, changing each layer from normal to pin light. I have also added the weather vane atop the cupola. Finally, I save all layers into one, and filter the image using the watercolor filter in the layers palette. This image is almost exactly as I envisioned the scene that I wrote in my novel.

A look at the menus

This is a segment of the menu palette I have on my second monitor. It gives you a sense of what each layer is doing, and what the imagery actually looks like. I have omitted the many broken glass layers. There were so many, it would be redundant.

Be sure to visit the Spider Lake Facebook page, and while you are at it, why not purchase a book? The reviews have been great!

Some Helpful Links:

https://www.createspace.com/4268086?ref=1147694&utm_id=6026

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CL0QPW4

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

Breaking down the process of a gifted photographer

About a year ago, I took an English class at our local community college. Having a real distaste for the English classes that I was forced to endure in high school, I had serious misgivings about taking the required class. I soon found out that I really enjoyed writing. The assignments that were given me sparked my imagination, and I realized that I was just as creative in my writing as I am when I am doing an oil painting, assembling imagery in Photoshop, or taking a photograph. I have been writing ever since, and I am about thirty thousand words into a manuscript for my first novel. My goal is to be finished with the book within six months.

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed for a teaching position, in which the instructor ( me ) would teach a week of photography, and two weeks of Photoshop. While I truly am an expert in both, I did not get the position. I assume the other applicant may have been less nervous than I. I am great at what I do, but when it comes to speaking in front of a group, big or small, I get stage-fright.

I was given the task of speaking about composition, and how it relates to photography, and I put together a twenty minute power point on the subject. In the course of my on-line research, I perused quite a few photography web sites. One site, which I thought was just outstanding, was that of a photographer named Koen Demuynck. In his recent work, he builds these wonderful montages of ( stacked up ) animals. The motion in the image of horses on his home page reminds me of a Frederic Remington painting on steroids.

I have been thinking about beginning a blog for quite a while. There are the obvious reasons for blogging, one of which is getting to a higher place on the search engines. Those little internet spiders love words, and a site with more imagery than words, lays around in cyberspace anonymity. I had to have more of a reason to write than just SEO, but I was not sure what my topics should be.

After putting a lot of thought into the teaching of digital photography and Photoshop last week, the idea occurred to me to begin by writing about how I would approach the creation of an image, whether it is a photograph or a painting. So, my plan is to begin with a study of :

Koen Demuynck's image of a pile of elephants

and see through the reconstruction of the same type of image, how I would approach the task. You can find his image at the link above, and scroll to his recent work section. When I was last there, it was image three.

Over the next couple of weeks I will build a similar image, one step at a time, and see how the whole thing comes together. The image I will put together will not take three weeks to complete! In real life it might take a matter of hours, but I will be putting a lot of screen shots of the imagery and menus to help the reader understand what I am doing. Kind of a "Photoshop" school.

The obvious beginning would be to bring my camera to a local zoo, or run away from home and travel with a circus to capture elephants in all sorts of various poses, but being as it is right around zero here in Chicago, I will have to settle for what I can find on the internet.

Step One: Find the Elements

What makes Koen's image work, is that all of the hues in the image are very close together. The sky is nearly the same color as the elephants. This marries the entire composition into something which at first glance seems believable. A closer look reveals that the image is "photographed" from a low angle which elevates the elephants. So, I will first find a foreground and sky that I can use for the image that I will be building. I always begin with a background, whether I am painting in oils, or composing digitally. Rather than going out with my digital camera and photographing the snowy ground and grey sky, I will google something like "Serengeti plains" and see what I come up with. When searching for imagery, I refine the search so that the images are larger than four megapixels.

Step Two: Get the image size and build the background

After finding two images that I can use for the foreground and the sky, I copy and paste the Demuynck image to the image of the sky. I then resize the file with snap to document bounds and snap to layers checked in the crop tool. The resulting size is 4000 pixels wide and 2033 pixels tall. With the proper dimensions, I will begin to build the image. I was also sure to have the crop tool set to "hide" rather than "delete". I drag a guide to the place where the horizon lies in the Demuynck image.

The images below show the approach I have taken to begin to get the "feel" of the Demuynck image. Image number one is the image i begin with. In the subsequent layers I build, I flip the sky resize it larger, and multiply it on itself to build the drama. I also resize the foreground and blur it as it moves towards the horizon line. ( image #2 ) I then use the original Demuynck image as a color layer to cause the layers below to be the same hues throughout. (( image #3 )

The resulting image of the background

Step Three: Start putting the elephants in!

This was a little harder than I thought it would be. The actual outlining was easy, but finding enough elephants on the internet was difficult. I placed twenty-one elephants in the file. Now I have to do a lot of dodging and burning so that the elephants look like they are all lit the same. I also have to add shadows where they belong. In the original Demuynck image, the elephants are back lit, so there are passages of equal value which help the composition as a whole. There is also some dust flying in the original to give the viewer a sense of motion. So I still have some work cut out for me.

Step Four: Finishing Touches

With the shadows in place and the dodging and burning complete, the image is finished. You can see the image in a larger size by clicking on the image above. if this were an actual production job, I might have taken greater care in the outlining, and there would probably be better imagery to start with, but when all is said and done, it didn't turn out all that bad. My thanks go out to the original artist, Koen Demuynck, It was his imagination which inspired the demonstration.


To see a full size image of my version, click here.

I am just writing a few words to format my blog.