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Tutorial: George Romero Zombie Trilogy Collage
Part III: Corrections, Color & Shadows
And here we go again.
Now that I have all the details for my 3 zombies here,
I go and create a new layer on top of them.
I name it "corrections".
Here, I will care about something I mentioned earlier:
those black lines you can still see on the borders.
I use my fine brush again
and use the color picker to select my tones.
So on this new layer, I simply draw on top of those black areas.
This creates more smooth borders
because in real life,
objects also don't have black outlines.
I just find it more beautiful.
I'm just taking care of Bub right now.
But I will also work on the other 2 characters
on the very same layer.
And here you can also see,
what I was talking about in Part 2 of my video:
That I let some single hairs stand out on the sides, simply to make it look more realistic.
In the dark areas its very simple, I just add little bits of more black.
Because black lines on black background isn't a problem. I just need to blur it a bit.
All that makes it look a little bit more life-like.
I often zoom out to take a look at the image as a whole.
To get an impression of how the details work out.
If you look at it in print size view, the human eye swallows a lot of the details again.
Which means you don't have to pay too much focus on details anyway.
I create another layer in the background and fill it with black.
There I can see how my characters
appear right now, especially on the contours.
And I find that already very appealing.
You also see that I take quite some time to look at it.
And yes, all in all, I feel ok with it. So I save it again.
Anything could happen, you never know.
I'll muck out my layers a bit now.
Since I have one all black layer now,
I won't need the copies of my outlines and the black spot layers anymore.
And I rename my black layer to "backgroundcolor".
I don't intend to leave it black, but
that way, I know that I will add my colors here later.
Now I create another clipping mask,
for the texture .
This will become my actual background.
And for that I have a special brush,
the "GRAND texture" brush. There he is.
265px diameter, that should do the trick.
If you look here at the parameters,
it's scanned-in brush spots that I did.
Size jitter is off, angle jitter: 100%
Minimum roundness: 25%
Opacity is switched off.
Smoothing is activated.
And as always, I reduce opacity and flow,
because that creates smoother transitions when I draw.
And I carefully start drawing
with a mix between brown and red.
And you see it creates such grungy, rusty textures.
Especially when you work with low opacity
you can blend it in a very smooth and softly way.
And I add brigther colors on top.
I want to create a transition between dark red and white.
As if some light shines through from beyond.
So far, I'm satisfied with the background
and start directly with the foreground.
That means: A new layer, right on the top.
I also name it "foreground", directly.
And I change the blending mode to "color",
because I want to bring more colors into my image.
But not with such a big brush, so I decrease the size a bit, yep.
And you see, I took a relatively dark blue tone
but with this blending mode,
it overlays with the image information that I already painted.
So if I look at the image in total,
I want to give the impression
that there are different colored light sources
which cause reflections in my characters faces.
It makes it look more three-dimensional
and alive,
even though they're undead.
I just think, especially when looking at Bub here in green...
Only different shades of green...
that looks a bit flat and plain.
If a little bit of blue can
add a bit of contrast into all that,
it makes it look much better.
From the left I have a kind of
green mustard tone.
Though because of the blending mode it looks almost yellow.
And for Stephen, I throw in a little green.
It just becomes more spatial that way.
And for the choice of colors,
here I add green, because Bub features a lot of green already.
On Bub I used a lot of blue, because there are still my blue zombies on the down which I still have to finish.
I always try to utilize color tones,
which already exist within my image.
I don't want it to become too colorful.
But also not too monotone.
But I think that since...
it's always different shades of those colors, it holds a certain ballance.
And in the end, that's what creates
a coherent image.
Here I add a little red, as in the background.
Also when I look at Stephen: orange, red, brown...
It's important that I don't apply the color too firmly.
I mean you see I use an opacity of 52%.
Because it's supposed to be subtle. It shouldn't be too gaudy.
In fact I already think I did it too strong on some areas.
I think that later I will go over that with a very soft eraser
to take some of that away again.
But...
I think you get the idea...
of where I'm going with this.
Sorry for the flickering screen, btw. I had some problems with my video codecs.
I could only solve it afterwards, sorry.
Next, I create another layer
and call it "shadow". It's right below the groups of Bub and Stephen.
Because what I did is,
that by entering those light sources, I made my image more plastically.
Yet still, those 3 characters still sit directly on top of each other.
That's why I take a soft brush,
similar to the one I used in the beginning for the first basic coloring steps.
And on this layer, I go behind my characters
and I use black
to create some sort of shadow.
Simply to make clear that there is a little more
distance between those characters
and that they're not directly laying on each other's edges.
I erase parts of that again to not make it too dark or too dominant.
And I notice that earlier, in my correction layer,
I missed a part.
First, I ty to
use the dodge and burn tools to correct it.
But that doesn't go so well.
No matter what settings I try.
So then I had enough.
I simply picked a black pen and painted over it.
I mean, right on that spot it's all black anyway
so it doesn't bother if I solve it that way.
But that's how it is: Sometimes you work on one part of your image
and suddenly you notice: Hey, there is this part which needs to be corrected!
That happens sometimes, so you jump back and forth between those things. No big deal.