oldpoxbox.com

STUFF TO BUY:

GOOD vs EVIL poster

Shirts!

Pixel Posters 4 pack

The Alphabet of Manliness

FRIENDS:

A MODEST TUTORIAL
(not safe for the work of you)

by:Pox

2008/02/05

Ok once you've found your general idea, and if you intend to do this 100% digital, for example because your scanner doesn't work with WindowsXP 64 bits because no one wastes their time developping drivers for that stupid version, then get yourself a reference image.

Here is a pretty nude lady that sort of looks like what I want to work with:

Now go into Photoshop and trace over that base picture. Now I wanted her with bigger boobs and to have the arms on top of something super-great.

Now make another background layer behind your base sketch and color it in with some sort of basic color scheme. Don't worry, this isn't important. Don't even know why I did it, I just saw it somewhere once.

Now, being naked is great but let's leather her up and draw in that sweet keytar. THAT IS ALSO A GUITAR. Name pending.

Now I made a new Photoshop document just for the guitar, because it's easier to select and draw stuff at a 90 degree angle when your object isn't all twisted.

Now this is the basic shape, done with the path tool. Nah just kidding, fuck that shit, I did this with just the selection tools like the rectangle thing and the circle thing.

Now go into filter > add awesome.

Now I must stress at this point the importance of REFERENCE IMAGES. I'm such a dumbshit I don't even know what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, so BAM, Google it and it's like you've been playing it all your life. Now most of the stuff you see here has been done with the gradient tool and there's also a couple of bevels and whatnot.

Obviously trendy assholes will tell you to not use filters and layer styles all the while making those same tutorials that show you how to make cliche shiny buttons for your various winamp skins you'll never finish.

But if you want to make a kickass keytar, you'll need to bevel those buttons.

Now flatten that keytar-guitar and import it into your main Photoshop document. Scale and rotate it as needed. That red line is the horizon line, mostly meant to position your stuff correctly.

Alright now add another layer under that outline and color your basic person shape with flat colors.

Then select whichever area you want and start shading it with the brush tool. Much easier if you have a tablet. Also a good idea to check some examples of whatever fabric you're drawing. Google again.

Just a couple more details in there...

Now for the part I really suck at: the skin. Just try and wing it with some shading. Preferably using a darker shade of skin color instead of just black. I also put a brown outline around the shape because I just can't leave it alone and not make it sorta cartoony.

And now hide those boobies.

Body paint? Yes.

And now for another annoying task: hair. I opted for the "Kim Wilde" here. I won't bore you with the details of how I drew this stuff. Suffice to say it takes a lot of little lines with tiny brushes. Don't worry if it looks sorta like ass right now.

Time to draw the face. I was feeling pretty lazy, so I just pasted the picture on there. Obviously the resolution is way too low so let's just paint over.

Woah now she's like Stifler's mom.

Neato, now here's what we have so far.

Just wasted a couple seconds adding more to that bg.

Ok now I flattened the entire character ( so save a backup of your file at this point ). I scaled her down so the title would fit on there. You can get it here:http://500bestsongsever.122mb.com./heavymetal.html Also placed some more background elements using the power of perspective.

I started searching online for pictures of amplifiers and I found this weird thing. No idea what it was, but it rocked.

Some sort of column. Anyways, make sure it matches your perspective. It was really a bitch to get each little rectangle to line up with a curvy perspective. And if you're wondering how I aligned them: I made another layer above the column and drew thin red guide lines using the circle selection tool. Then I just skewed each little piece until it matched it as closely as possible.

If you have no idea what I said, don't put cylinders in your backgrounds.

Obviously I wasn't about to let that work go to waste, so I duplicated that column a couple times and now we have a background. Also added little lights on there so it would sort of look like each column was slightly different.

Also added some blue smoke in between the BG and the character, to hide the bottom of the columns. A good way to do smoke is to get a set of cloud brushes. So go find that online somewhere.

So now it's time to fill in those big boxes. What are they?

Amps. Hell yeah. Once again, use Google to get reference images. Once again, those things were mostly made with the marquee tools and gradients.

Yes, all done. I colored the title as well. You can get rid of that red line at this point.

Added some more lights in the background to hide my crappy first bg. Sort of like pretend studio lights.

Also now comes the time to try and fix the face. It's really a bitch, there always seems to be something wrong. Face paint helps distract from the bad details haha. Yes.

Also I put some blue and pink highlights in that hair but she ended up looking a little too much like a Cyndi Lauper fucked Bozo the clown so I scrapped that.

Alright add some blue haze all over the place to give this a little atmospheric depht. Tried to fix the face a little more.

Ah, so annoying. Especially since it changes your perception of it depending on how far you zoom in and out. So when you resize your image, you may notice that some details look a little off. Like the eyes. DAMN YOOOOU.

Ok not bad. Now let's add some zazz. And by that I mean a cliche alternate source of light that just happens to be red and thus sorta neat. Also brought the title back in front of the haze so it would stand out more.

Now she's standing on LAVA. Radical.

Now just add some text in there if you want. I just used the font "Arial" and "Arial Black" which obviously is a font faux-pas and really not trendy.

But it's alright since this is a cover from 1991, before all this font madness.

Also added a blue outline to the character and keytar.