A Dieselpunk Elephant (and a short tutorial)
I wanted to share with you one of my recently completed personal pieces:
This the third in my surreal, dieselpunk-themed animal paintings.
Here’s a list of my Photoshop process, from back to fore:
- The mesh background is a seamless background from Ron Deviney’s “Cyborg Parts” set.
- A few grunge brushes over the mesh gave it a less uniform look and some distressing. Layer was 58% opacity set to “soft light” blending.
- That’s underneath the roots/tendril plate I made by drawing a tree with a hard brush, then copying and rotating three times to make the symmetrical, kind of rorschach test shape. This was given a layer style with bevel/emboss, color overlay and pattern overlay. Underneath this was a copy of the layer, filled with black, gaussian blur applied and moved down to simulate a shadow. 80% opacity on this.
- The middle ground is a geometric figure I made in Illustrator CS5, given a similar treatment to the “tree” plate. Layers below and above used bits from the “Cyborg Parts” set and the combination of layer style shadows, hand-airbrushed shadows, and surgical editing with dodge and burn gave it depth and volume.
- The elephant was painted by hand using greyscale photo references. Building it with the tried and true “mass before detail,” it gradually coalesced into a reasonably convincing elephant. The wrinkles around the eyes were a lot of fun to do! Since I painted in grayscale, I colored my elephant with a gradient map when it was finished.
- The gas mask was hand painted as well. I looked at a few references of gas masks, but since nothing like it exists in real life I had to wing it. This makes for some interesting problem solving. For example, what do you do about the tusks? I had to invent the rubber gasket around them, imagining holes in the mask provided for exactly that purpose. There had to be a wider glass to accommodate the face and beady little eyes. And of course, the canister hose that doubles as a repository for the trunk had to start wide and taper down. I’m pleased with how it turned out overall.
- The canister on the mask was actually modeled in Google Sketchup and imported into Photoshop were I painted over it, distressed it, and merged it with the hose. I wanted to get the perspective just right to convey depth in the picture and doing it in 3D made it a cinch. Google Sketchup is free, BTW.
- The elephant and mask were marqueed together to make a black fill layer underneath. Again, gaussian blurred, 60% opacity, and moved downwards to create a shadow over everything else.
- A separate layer of “shadow fixes” exists where the airbrush was used to mold shadows over shapes to make it more convincing.
- The rest is post production stuff and here’s the run-down:
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- levels adjustment.
- A “desatch” layer — a full black fill, set to “hue” blending, and 10% opacity. This is really subtle, but it knocks back some of the more saturated areas to pull the piece together more. You could do this with a hue/saturation adjustment layer, but I prefer this method.
- A layer that is a hybrid of a texture from GoMedia’s “Etched into Dark” set, and a multi-hued, super saturated, radial gradient. This layer is set to color burn at 10%. Again, very subtle, but the added texture and seemingly random splashes of color that ghost the image is just one of my favorite things. I love that!
- A lens flare at the top of the glass, created with Red Giant’s Knoll Light Factory plugin (which is a badass plugin).
- And finally, a gradient map with the “yellow, orange, violet, blue” gradient, set to color dodge and 10% opacity. More off-the-wall coloration ghosting the final image. That’s kind of one of my things.
So there you have it. It’s a dark piece, but that’s what I wanted. Something industrial and noir.
This is available as a print in my Etsy shop.
You can also see the other two pieces so far in this Dieselpunk series on my website’s portfolio, or on my Behance page.
I hope this was informative and interesting to you! If you make something using some of the ideas or links I’ve provided, let me know. I’d really love to see it!