How to Create Super-Detailed Wildlife Illustrations

hello I'm Alex Reis and this is a video for Tut's Plus and in this video I'm gonna walk you through my method for creating photo-realistic wildlife illustrations in this case I'm going to show you how i illustrate a small metallic predatory fly that's coming to my part of the world here in australia you can see here I've got the workplace set up with my references on the side and here's the size that we working it's a five thousand pixel wide canvas and that's because I want to work in extremely high level of detail basically you want to set this as high as your computer will allow and with the size set you can see there that I've got the canvas in the center of the screen the layers palette on the right and two pre-prepared collections of reference photographs on the left and before illustrating I just zoom in and have a look around and try and get the photograph that gives me the best overall view of the creature I don't have to worry too much about details at this stage basically I want to get an of an overview of the proportions so that when I start doing the lineart for the painting which will come much later on all the proportions are as accurate as possible selecting a size four brush which works quite well with a five thousand pixel white canvas see here I draw a mid line and I start sketching in all the elements of the creature starting here with the head and once I get that right I can start working my way down and you'll notice they're pretty basic shapes trying to keep it reasonably symmetrical but at this stage it's not too important and I'm using there you can see in the red I've Illustrated a little proportion ruler so I've gone based on one eye width and that allows me to check back and forth to the reference to make sure that I'm getting all the body proportions correct just extending it down there when I start working on the abdomen and you'll notice there that I just resized the entire creature so far that's because as I drawer I note that the creature is gonna be a lot longer and lot bigger than I thought and you have to continuously adjust to make sure it'll fit in with the canvass proportions you're working with I still want to make it fit in with something reasonably square so just keep downsizing as I move out and starting here on the legs I'm noticing that I'm going to have to quite dramatically shrink it on this canvas because the legs of a creature this small to maintain its stability are going to be quite long especially considering its predatory and so I started I'm using a combination just general drawing skill and the rotate tools things like that just to make sure I get all the legs posed accurately I'm trying to put them in a reasonably neutral pose as well to fit with this sort of formal scientific illustration style and there you'll see once I was happy with one side I just deleted the other but the remaining layer and located it now I've got a perfectly symmetrical illustration and as I draw in the the base of what will become the wings here just have to note that I don't want it to be completely symmetrical when I get to the end product so I will make adjustments to the leg positions and things like that as we move on and here I'm just trying to draw I've got a new layer and a new color just to differentiate it I've dimmed the other layer and I'm just positioning the wings where I need them and once I've got the wings and the general proportions I need just dimmed that layer again and I've started work on the body now that I can see where the wings are going to be it makes placing the other elements of the body a little bit easier I'm continuing here to detail some elements of the lower torso that I've missed before and just going back up to the head continuously adding bits and pieces of extra detail here and there refining the shape of other items never getting the line work completely smooth is just not necessary for this sort of line art and now I'm just adding indicators for this segments I'm trying to get in as close as I can to these references to see just how many segments there are I want to be as accurate as possible and now putting placeholders for the hairs these will not be part of the final illustration I'm just placing everything and as I do I'm sort of learning more about the creature as well and how the hairs work and and where they're placed on the body again I can use that symmetrical trick of just deleting one half and duplicating and now I dip in the lines layer and underneath it on a new layer I'm gonna start the masking process so I've just selected a green that's roughly equivalent to the body though at this point it's really not necessary just use a colour based on how well it stands out against the background canvas and I'm just painting in here the essential segments of the body and I'm going to make sure that every different element that has a different color is going to have its own layer as well so these are the main body segments just duplicated again to get the mirror effect so I can get perfect symmetry and because I want to paint this section in between the thorax and the abdomen as well as the legs at a separate time in a separate color I am keeping them on their own layer so the legs are beneath everything and the separation between the thorax and the abdomen is above and the sort of mirrors how they're actually stacked on a real animal now I'm painting segment by segment the legs and it's quite critical at this stage in this masking stage to get it as accurate as possible because during the colouring stage we're going to rely on the accuracy of the things we've laid down at this stage to keep everything the proportions that we want because we're probably not going to go back to much and change these shapes the eyes because they'll be relatively detailed and quite different of course have their own layer on the head and the antennae things like that really find details often you can cluster all the fine details onto one layer in this case the antennae are getting their own as well as other minor details in the head making sure they're symmetrical again because on the fly they usually are held symmetrically so having differences in antenna position aren't important for this kind of illustration painting in the neck as I as you can see in the references it's almost black hidden in the shade of the head so that'll have its own layer as well as these wing mounds here basically anything that intersects okay now we're putting in the base of the wing and we're going to start on the wing detailing at this stage and I want to get the veins as this is a scientific illustration as accurate as possible so we're going to use the photo references directly your style Turing their brightness and contrast here on the reference image to get as much clarity as possible I'm going to trace out the essential shape and position of the veins because I want these to basically be perfect as in a lot of scientific illustration these sort of elements are critical for identifying individual species also I'm not considering the line item doing here final but I am trying to get the position of all these veins as accurate as possible and on some subjects can be rather difficult to make them out particularly as you can see it gets rather convoluted up towards the wing mounting with the body but as you get further out things get a little less detailed and that has its own challenges you can see here doing a lot of back and forth trying to get these big long uninterrupted curves right and it takes a lot of figured attempts step back another attempt step back now that I'm happy with the basics and because we're tracing we don't want to rely on a strategy like that too much switched off the underlay now that I've got the basic vein shape I'm starting to thicken them up and again keeping a close eye on the photo references bring them up to the shapes that you can actually see and I've had to redraw and warp some of the lines just to make them smooth it can be quite challenging to get long smooth uninterrupted lines like that accurate it's a lot easier in physical media in digital media sometimes you have to use a few tricks like the warp tool and generally obviously this is sped up but even when I'm doing it normally ilustrate the long lines with a quick sweep of the brush and the quicker the better and here I'm just masking in and making semi-transparent the wing membrane and although I had it in basic form before doing it again now trying to get it to match the vein and line art that I had established earlier okay now that I'm reasonably happy with that I've got most of the veins in place and most of the elements that I need I'm gonna lock off the transparent pixels of the layer and I'm gonna start shading in in this case the legs gonna start on the outer details just following the references and as their legs are sort of semi-transparent tubes you can see I've got the darker edges showing through the sort of fluid-filled yellow interior and now I'm doing the same with the sort of pretty complex and convoluted flesh that mounts the wings to the thorax just trying to match the folds and stuff as much as I can once I've got that obviously I just do that little trick again where I symmetrize things and now I can start on the main body now that I'm happy with the legs and some of the other minor details I'm taking a large soft brush and trying to match the sort of chrome metal shininess of some of the references obviously in this case I'm following the one on the bottom left quite closely and over the course of this tutorial I will actually change my mind but at the moment that is the clearest one I've got and I'm mostly using standard brushes a few sort of mildly textured ones are being used as well just to give a little bit of roughness to the surface but a lot of this is being done with standard Photoshop brushes particularly since this is such a smooth surface and as you can see I got rid of the large dark area in the center there just to try and make it look as if the light source is a bit more overhead and we're going to start adding even more refined detailed now I'm focusing a lot on the edges especially ran the head where the the base of the neck joins as well as adding a little bit of color variety around between the eyes there and bringing some of that sort of very white haloed edge to some of the chrome and now we can start adding details to the tube like legs it's going to be relatively simple there's not a lot of detail on these simple structures mostly I'm giving them just a few highlights here and there to show that they're created from shiny cuticle and once I zoomed in I noticed obviously that a lot more detailing needs to be done so I'm going to save as before I make any dramatic changes and I make sure that I do this fairly frequently I save later ative Li which means I save a new copy separately we're never going to make a major change in this case we're up to number three I've decided that you can see in the bottom left there I want to warp the body into that of a male so it's sort of a more interesting more unusual shape and don't be afraid to make pretty dramatic changes even quite late in the rendering process if you think you come up with a better idea it's best to just like the old one go and try and as you can see here I'm just piecing together the male torso from the remains of the female one and it's not that big a job now I have to go back in obviously and repaint I'm going to add a brush effect here soft light in this case which can add a little bit of a color difference without interfering with the detail too much now I'm adding the banding the very dark banding you can see on the reference image I'm doing that on its own layer because it's so different I don't want to interfere with underneath and I started out dark and I've started to work my way towards light I've started with simple base colors and worked the highlights up you can see there I'm adding some white reflection along the sides of the abdomen because they'd be reflected up from the white background in this case I'm continuing the detailing this time is oom doubt a bit I want to make sure I'm not making any changes that don't translate now that I'm ready to do the wings because I'm pretty happy with the body you know delete the legs on that side copy the legs from the other just change the pose a bit now that I've got these real legs that are interacting with the wings and their own layer I can switch them on and off and do what I need to do on the wing membrane without them interfering too much because they'll have to appear underneath it somehow so I've just started here giving some highlights around the veins and adding some of the color variation you can see in the references I have to work this up into a full rainbow eventually and to do so I'm using very rough edge brush with a few scattered settings and things like that just to make sure I don't give any illusion the wing membranes are smooth because as you can see on the reference they're really not now I turned my attention back to the legs I've got the back leg that's going to appear under the wing duplicated I'm just patching up some of the damaged cutting out leg out did duplicating the wing and leg combination and now I can work on the legs without interfering with the wing membranes and without interfering with the other legs either adding a bit more pose difference before I start coloring the wings again I'm just going to work my way out the spectrum I started with purple I've worked up through bluey purple towards aqua and now into the green and diffusing a little bit of that now adding more and more highlights sort of a go for a soap bubble effect and it's important at this stage to follow the reference closely because the temptation will be to paint quite smooth and regular wings and as you can see especially around the edges they're quite rugged and I'm just adding a little bit of definition to the edge of the wing because we got a white background it can be a little bit difficult to see where the wing ends and I've also started painting in on those legs wherever the leg goes under a vein or under a highlight I've added a highlight and the vein as well to match so now it looks like you're looking through the soap bubble exterior of the wings and seeing the legs beneath and this is quite an enjoyable part as well taking a sort of a regular brush I'm just painting in the areas of the torso that diffracted beneath the wings or the thorax rather to be technical and adding a few highlights in where the wing member interacts with the body following the references again you'll notice that not all the highlights away you'd expect them to be sometimes there's kinks in the wing membrane and I'm not doing it completely symmetrically either I'm adding areas of damage and faults that are not present from one wing to the other and as I complete the major detailing of the wing now I'm going to start thinking about how I'm going to tackle the eyes as their compound I've been a user a custom brush accredit which is a series of sort of little half domes which will look good for the individual eyes of the compound and I've added a few little art tricks it changes direction with the direction of your stylus in shape dynamics which lets you paint across the curve of the eye and just following the reference I've started in using the sort of our reflected nature of these eyes I've got a darker interior with a lighter exterior around the edges and just adding a bit of color variation as you can see in the references again where the dark and light fade in together zooming in a little bit occasionally to get so dark borders of the eyes details and you can also see I'm pursuing a few dead ends here and there and I'm doing a lot of back-and-forth so I undid a lot of what I just did then I've added these sort of coloured highlight areas on top which more closely resemble the left-hand bottom reference because it's being lit from above as our images as well okay and just finishing up some of those hyper detailing on the head now giving a nice little border to some of the elements where the hairs amount and the three smaller eyes on top and now that I'm reasonably happy with the way that's all rendered so the next step is going to be to start adding those hairs there's large sensory hairs you can see all over the body so I'm setting that with its own layer I don't want interfere with the rendering work I've done so far and I'm just going to start positioning the hairs as I see them in the reference and there is a little bit of back-and-forth your eye sometimes doesn't quite process the direction right these ones are pained a little bit flat and I will come back later to refine and I'm doing that our cemetery trick as well to make sure the hair is at place right starting to do some of the hairs on on the edge and as you can see on the abdomen there are a lot of hairs and they don't all follow strict our placement rules so you just have to get the gist of them right I'm putting a lot of the smaller hairs along the edge there and relatively randomly doing the symmetry trick again obviously they can't be completely symmetrical so I'm just adding a little bit of variation there with a few of the key hairs not pointing in exactly the same directions on either side continuing to detail these hairs and just lightening them a little bit as well because they're a little bit too prominent I think along the abdomen and now I can add in the lake hairs and although the references don't all agree I'm gonna focus on the one that's closest to what I want which is the male fly and now in a new layer I've also added a few the shadows the larger hairs cast on the shiny carapace which just adds an extra level of depth and sort of binds everything together nicely and while I was in denial so noticed how completely flat the wing bones are so I'm just adding in some nice highlights to some of the key areas of the wing bone as well as refining them a little bit because they're a little bit rough and towards the edges and we're gonna keep working so I'm gonna save a new idea of company we're up to five now make sure that I can always go back not happy with the direction because I want to do some pretty major revisions to display this torso shaded that big dark area in the bar a bit I'm not really happy with it doesn't really reflect the the light source that I'm working with I'm assuming that I'm working with a light source that's above the fly and that means bringing some of the mirrored shiny greenness down a little bit a lot of back and forth making sure that I get the reflections right using a soft brush just to toy with the value along the back there and this is quite a dynamic stage of painting as you can see I'm doing lots of back and forth I'm repainting entire areas that I'd considered relatively finished before and I'm using the lasso tool to make sure that the changes I'm making a kept within the bounds I want because we're dealing with reflective surfaces some of the delineations between light and dark can be quite sharp and although the lasso tool rarely gives you a really clean line it does make it a lot cleaner than free-handed you can always go and refine it with a soft brush later here I'm just toying with the hue/saturation of that new highlight area and ultimately I decided to go back to what I'd originally painted because that works quite well and now I'm going to spend a little bit more time on the way these rear legs appear through the surface of the wing membrane so I'm using the blur tool here so to a relatively high value just to make sure the legs do look like you're looking through the irregular surface of one of these wing membranes and take me opportunity of course as always to fix up the surrounding areas so I'm doing a little bit more wing detailing as well as jumping two completely different parts of the creature because if you work on everything at once you can make sure you don't spend too much time detailing a small area that ultimately you have to change later I'm jumping around as I noticed problems and I'm noticing here that I forgot to draw in the halters depart of the fly flight map brightest and which had just obscured beneath the wings on these references so I don't need to be super detailed because these going to be blurred and distorted I just need to get the values right value in color and the surface texture of these things will be the surface texture of the wing membrane so I don't need to spend too much time on that so I'm just adding the I see a yellow highlight there made of the similar material to the wing membrane and the legs and now that that's complete I'm going to start working the shadows you can see here I've created a duplicate of the entire fly without the background attached and I'm going to use that as the basis to create the shadow for the entire body so I'm going to lock transparent pixels on that layer select black from somewhere in the painting is in the eyedropper I'm just painting and everything the same uniform dark color and you can see I've also duplicated the hair so it's a completely detailed shadow using the warp tool edges to link the legs up with the contact points on the paper and I'm having a little bit of trouble I'm really not quite happy with it so I'm doing a lot of shape changing and distortion to try and get it to match more accurately with the way I think the curves of the body and the shake of the wings be reflected through and as I was sumed out there I noticed that the hairs were far far too thick so I'm redrawing some of those much much thinner you can see him to her on the back as well the back was the main problem area and it was so bad and I was so coarse they undermine the entire picture so I actually decided to repaint them entirely with a much thinner brush back to the size four I used to design the line art initially and I'm using on all parts of the body for this new hair including the head and I'm trying to get the curve right this time last time the hairs were painted as if they sort of laid flat across the thorax and I need to add the curves that looks like the the hairs arced down and contact the thorax at a much greater angle and now obviously that I've changed the the shape of the hairs I have to change them to reflect on the shadow beneath as well back to the torso which I was altering earlier mostly minor changes at this stage though it does need to be darkened up a little bit and some of the effects I'm using a quite subtle painting in something bold altering the layer a little bit even deleting it if I'm not happy sometimes you just encountered dead ends with these things and you just have to abandon the work you did don't be too precious and don't cling on to things that just don't work it's a critical component most artistic fields rather dramatically cause killing your babies and it just means letting go of an element of an illustration it become precious to you not because you think it works but because of the amount of time you spent on it and because this fly is now a male some of the elements from the original illustration reflect the female and the male because he detects the female via pheromones on his antennae I have to extend them quite radically you can see on the bottom left there that very long very hair like it's using the warp tool and a very fine brush just to get the curve in the shape the way I want it and using a soft edge brush just to whittle down the end sort of put a very fine end and because they're symmetrical anyway I'm just going to duplicate them and swing them across now playing a little bit more around with the shadow because it doesn't look quite right to me particularly where it joins to fit in the front leg leaving that for now because the wings are transparent obviously the shadow is going to have sections where the wing membrane allows light through so I'm just adding a little bit of detail there with a similar rough brush to one I used earlier to paint the wing membrane itself and that has a pretty significant effect that I was quite happy with because the shadow was a little bit too severe I thought continuing that effect I'm not going to duplicate it and just have the winged shadow the same on either side because they're not identical and I don't want that reflected in the shadows and now addressing the problem area of these upper legs decided not to go with the completely accurate duplication just are added in sand faded off areas and while I was doing that I noticed I do have to complete the detailing of these feet and they end in two very small hooks there are some other details there but they're so small that sometimes my research just doesn't show them but I know the hooks are present because that is a characteristic of flies like this so I'm just adding them in as a nice way to terminate the legs even though the detail will be very difficult to see from the resolution that's a probably be viewed at and you'll see there that I've also created a duplicate of the leg on the right that sticks out beneath the wings I wasn't happy with having that left leg hidden beneath the wing it looked like the leg just wasn't there I'm setting some highlights here there I've got their own layer and the layer effect is set to linear dodge as you can see because that allows us to gets very interesting lighting effects that work quite well with this sort of chrome almost metallic look of this insect but generally if you've got linear dodge set on you need to keep the effect relatively subtle because it can be very strong and it can overpower any details that you have underneath so as you can see I'm actually erasing a fair bit of it because it was just a little bit too much and I can also at this stage add in some of the highlights that you can see on the references are there on these darkest sections so just in the hue/saturation of the entire image now because I want to get a little bit I can experiment getting the atoll thing a little bit warmer or a little bit cooler and my male reference on the lower left there he's a little bit warmer so I'm toying with the idea of just keeping it with it more Orange although when you play with the hue saturation of the entire image you can have our undesirable effect but I can be even more precise than that I've used the replace color tool I've selected an area of general green and this tool allows me to change selected colors without affecting too much of the others by adjust the fuzziness I can expand the effect although as you can see at this r52 fuzziness the effect pretty localized to one band of green now once it finished fooling around with that I can also get some systemic effects with one of these solid color layers now it's a layer that covers the entire image because it's set to overlay it it only effects colors in the way that that layer effect allows and by using two of them I can get some really interesting combinations and I can get a much warm image as you can see here or a more neutral one just by adjusting the properties of those layers and nothing else and I often use these as a part of almost anything I paint to get a really interesting final effects before I export it's especially useful for really unifying everything together you can get a quite disparate colors or just a slightly washed out image to really look quite interesting and I just saved a new copy there because we're entering the final stages I want to make sure I don't make any big mistakes at this point and I'm gonna sign the image usually I create a new layer and to make it look a little bit better at its low resolution I actually make the signature quite large as you can see using an unusual Photoshop brush and then I just stick it down the corniche shrunk down and it retains some of the detail you had the advantage of gaining because you work so large now fixing a few of the minor errors left over from earlier we have to extend the shadows of the antenna a little bit because we're now working with a much larger male antenna checking through my layers to make sure that everything's at the position I want altering opacity to make the hairs a little bit transparent because I though showing up a little bit too much checking everything you'll see that I've zoomed out I'm not zoomed in to get hyper detail at this point I'm zoomed out to make sure the overall effect works its most critical that the image although the detail has to be there should work from the resolution that people will be looking at it and this is about the size I imagined we'd probably be seen by the intended audience in this case researchers or just the general public and now that I've set the overlay layers how I want them that's pretty much it it's ready for export at this point so I thank you for joining me and I'll see you next time

Channel: Tuts+ Design

Views: 17,923

Keywords: Photoshop, tutorial, illustration

Id: uF-vPHSkCl4

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 16 2014