Smudge painiting

Smudge painting.
I felt that after making the last mock up. That the player character looked out of place with all, the rest of the hand drawn concept art. That I was using to make the image.
 So I decided to create an effect that make the image look a lot more like it had been painted by hand instead of being a rendering.


I first open a new session in Photoshop and loaded in the default player character using CTRL + Alt + I to change the resolution to 300 pixels per inch.

TheI selected the layer mask option and then with the mask selected I used the quick selection wand to select the outline of the figure.
Taking extra care, and making sure none of the back ground in the selection.

Next I used the refine edge tool to bring the selection inward by 2mm. This was to neaten up the selection and make sure any of the back ground was totally removed.

While still on the mask layer I selected the fill bucket and black, and then filled in the area outside the selection. This makes the background transparent.

 

I then pressed Ctrl+ M to bring up the curves options I then messed around with the options to adjust the images tonal range.

I then did the same thing with the levels CTRL + L this time trying to get it image to be slightly brighter.
 
I then right clicked on the selection and duplicated it.
I renamed the layer smudge as that’s the main method of painting I was going to be using.

Then clicking Flitter à Flitter gallery, to option the gallery.
I chose artist—and paint dabs using a brush size of 5 and sharpness of 15, this added a slight texture to my image,

Next select the smudge tool it is located in the tool box with sharpen tool and blur tool. By default it can be found on the tool box on left hand side of the screen. It looks like a finger pointing down.

Set the strength at the top to around 50% grab a brush with a hardness of zero I used the soft brushes. Then Decrees the size down to 1-5 pixels. Start smudging it’s important to make sure you go in the direction of the shape of the face or object.  I found it fair easier using a Wacom tablet than a mouse for this project.

You can then turn up the size of the brush as you go, though I found if you increase the size it worth dropping the strength. This makes it easier to see if you’re doing the right things. A fair amount of trial and error will go in to this to get things exact. When working in areas of shade I changed the Mode from normal to darken. And working on highlights change to mode to lighten.

The burn the tool with Mode on shadows and 25% exposure was used on the darkest shadows. Also by changing out to a speckled brush you can make convincing stubble.
The dodge tool with Mode on Midtones was used to help high light fine details that were getting lost like wrinkles on figures and the veins and creases on the brow on the head.
This can be quite time consuming but the results can be impressive if you take the time.

There were often point were the blending didn’t work at this times I would take a sample of the colours I wanted to blend with eyedropper tool. Then using the mixer brush ( found under the paint brush) and a small and smooth brush work on the troubled areas.

snap shots are also useful if you get to a place  you like. (Clicking the picture of camera, at the bottom right of the screen in-between Create new document and the rubbish bin). This will save the state of the image and you can easy switch back to it if you make a mistake and you or you done too much to undo.

Having done too much to undo isn’t usually a problem in Photoshop but this technique requires you makes a lot of small changes. So it also worth setting up your scratch disk in options if you got space to spare to increase the amount of undoes you can do.

the next stage is to Apply a new filter to the image Smart sharpen filter. Filter > Sharpen> Smart Sharpen.
The filter was then applied. And then it was time to repeated the smudging, burn and dodge step where needed.