(click on image to enlarge)
The stages to completing the father/son illustration:
The first stage (not shown above) is the most important stage of prayerfully reading the lesson text several times, making written and visual notes, historical and theological research, consider cultural differences between countries, drawing multiple (10-20) different thumbnail sketch ideas before deciding on a final idea. These mini sketches may look like primitive chicken scratch to some folks but they are vital to the process! This is the more time consuming stage with 95% of the decisions being made here before proceeding.
#1-3 Many reference photos are taken from various angles and locations then I select the ones to use for the illustration. This may even involve using body parts from different photos and merging them into one person.
#4 Time to merge, mask and edit the images in Adobe Photoshop. This may also involve redrawing, perspective correction, etc. For a Bible scene, there would be an additional stage of totally redrawing a scene from the reference photos. Modern day application illustrations like this are much easier than a Bible scene.
#5 This stage involves creating multiple layers in Photoshop. The image may have 20-30 layers on top of each other where I use different digital brushes to add controlled dodging/burning, local colour adjustment layers, level adjustments, masking, etc.. Redrawing areas may be required and colour decisions are finalized at this stage. This is all done with individual brush strokes using a Wacom® pen on screen. No "one click" trick Photoshop art filters are used.
#6 The Photoshop file is imported into Corel Painter X to create the final painting/illustration. This is similar to traditional painting, using individual paint brush strokes and not applying any "instant" art filters. Corel Painter is excellent at creating natural media brush strokes and blending ... minus the setup or clean up. The painting is brought back into Photoshop for final touch ups.
Photoshop and Corel Painter have greatly reduced my production time. The final production stages #4-6 (after the initial research, sketch stage) may take between 1-3 days. Some Bible scenes will take longer. The final stages #4-6 of the above illustration took around 10 hrs. to complete.
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