2D Artist Magazine recently got in touch with me asking if I would like to make a painting tutorial for them.
I had a couple of illustrations published on their magazine a while ago (I mean this one and this one), and I was chuffed they got in touch with me again.

“Would I like to write a painting tutorial? Hell yes!” was my first thought. Suddenly followed by “Me? Really? Would anyone actually care about how I do things?” further followed by “oh well, I’ll do it anyway”.

Long story short, if you get this month’s issue you’ll find a nice painting tutorial about a villain who uses nasty spores to hurt people just because he can.

Drawing was the easy part. Writing the actual painting tutorial was to me like threading on a mine field.
Where’s the line between trying to be informative and being patronizing?
What’s the level of knowledge of the average 2D Artist reader? Am I showing stuff everybody knows? Am I trying to teach grandma to suck eggs?
Eventually I decided not to care and write about things I found relevant, regardless of what I thought most people could find trivial.
After all, one of my colleagues, a seasoned professional, didn’t know he could select layers by CTRL-clicking on their pixels regardless of your active tool, so well, even veterans could find out something new.

FOR EXAMPLE.
Something not everybody uses as a way of colouring is the Blending Options in the Layer Style palette (double click on the layer icon in the Layers Palette to bring it up).
I mentioned this in the tutorial but the word count forced me to be
concise, so I’d like to say more about it.
The Blending Options Palette controls how a layer blends (duh) with the underlying ones.
I always ignored this feature, until I realized how heart-warmingly cool it can be!
The basics: The uppermost slider controls what parts of the active layer will be shown and what parts will be hidden.
The other slider dictates which parts of the underlying layer will be revealed though the active layer.
Here’s a quick example: create a new file.

Paint this on the bottommost layer

and this on the topmost.

Now double click on the topmost one and play with the sliders.

Now, one of the reasons why I never really used this feature is that I didn’t know how to use it properly!
When using it to achieve subtle effects the result was always messy, with harsh edges and bad gradients.
Until I found out you can split the slider arrows! Those buggers are made of two halves, did you ever notice? I didn’t!

Try ALT-Clicking on the innermost half of either arrow and drag it towards the centre. Whatever blending you were trying to achieve will now be now soft-edged and nice, perfectly blended.
Now, if in your head you haven’t yet found an actual practical application of this technique, first download the painting tutorial on 2D Artist Magazine, then go on reading:)

This is an old concept I made for a Runescape quest a couple of years ago.

Since I had to paint different points of view of the same city I had to find an efficient way to do it.
So I modelled the city on Sketchup, took screenshots of the relevant views and painted over them.
The first pass was always the following:

I created a Photo Filter set on Warm Colours on top of the Grey Scale screenshot of the 3D view.

I tweaked the blending mode so that only the lit parts were affected.
Then I created another Photo Filter set on Cold Colours and I blended it so that it affected only the parts in shadow.

As you can see in a handful of seconds I went from a greyscale image to a strong separation between warm and cool colours I could properly paintover. I manage to paint a view like this in only 5-6 hours.

Another example is how to paint over fine details without using selections.
In this character I designed for Runescape I painted the highlights with 100% white on top of the chain mail, then blended it so that the dark parts of the texture could be seen though the white (below I painted an exaggerated example of this on the already finished drawing).

You can use this for a lot of things! For example, I never use Overlay mode on the texture I (rarely) put on my drawings, as they tend to mess with the colours. I keep them in normal mode and I tweak the sliders to reveal only the parts that I need.
Give it a try!

by Paolo Puggioni