The Basics of Illustration in Photoshop

I've been lucky in that most of the things I now do for a living, I fell into. They started out as a hobby that I enjoyed in my free time, and have worked into something that earns an income.

One of those things is illustration.

Using Photoshop, you already have everything you'll ever need to create your own visually stunning illustrations. Want to know the basics to get you started? You need a copy of Photoshop - any version will do - and enough patience to get you through the whole "practice, practice, practice" thing.

Illustrating in Photoshop

There are essentially four steps to creating a polished illustration in Photoshop, each step using its own unique tools and techniques. As you become more comfortable with your skills, you will learn how to adapt each step to using your own version of the tools or changing the order of steps to create art that's all you. For now, here's my method.

1. Outline

Your first step is to create an outline for your art. An outline is basically a sketch, and can be achieved in a variety of ways. If you are comfortable drawing freehand on paper, sketch out your work and scan it to your computer. This method will likely mean having to clean up your scan - it's not difficult, but you need to learn how and can do that here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/75229/cleaning_scanned_images_in_photoshop.html

The next two methods of outlining are both digital. If you have a graphics tablet (a Wacom is, undoubtedly, the best) you can still sketch freehand with no learning curve. Just plug your tablet in, hit Photoshop's pen tool, and sketch away.

Don't have a graphics tablet? Don't panic! You can do this with your mouse, too, though you'll probably need some reference photos. When you find your reference photos, make certain that they are either ones you've taken yourself or are copyright free with no usage restrictions, or you can land in a deep pile of trouble. Then, grab Photoshop's pen tool and start outlining the shapes from your reference.

When you create an outline, make sure to stick with black and use thinner lines over thicker ones. The thicker your lines, the more easily any mistakes will show up.

2. Base Colors

With your outlines in place, it's time to decide what your base colors will be. Create a new layer below your outlines and start coloring. Use a basic brush, not one of the blurred-edge or drop-shadow brushes - you want the lines to be crisp and go right up to the edge of the outlines without spilling out over.

Don't worry about adding depth yet. All that this step will do is define the color of skin, eyes, clothes, or flowers, trees, and sky. It's the very base, the first coat of color your final illustration will use.

Try to keep each different color, or the color of each thing, on separate layers. This makes life easy if you later decide you hate that shade of pepto-pink and want to change just that color (which you can then do using the layer style's color overlay - yay!).

3. Shadow & Highlight

Now that you've gone through and laid down the base layer of color, you can start adding shadows and highlight. Make sure to paint each piece on its own layer here, every single one of them. Why? Because some shadows and highlights will look much better if you add a bit of a gaussian blur to them, or if you lower their fill opacity ... but other ones won't need it. If you smash it all onto the same layer, you're going to have a nightmare making adjustments.

When you're painting highlights, take the time to study how the highlights are affected by shadow. In the illustration attached to this tutorial, the blanket has a lot of highlight and shadow. To achieve a realistic, smooth look, lay down the shadow first. Then, on a new layer (of course) lay down highlights that are inside the shadow to show how something curls or is raised closer to the light.

Most of the time, you'll use more shadows on skin than you will highlights. Just take your time and use a basic brush and lots of layers until you have something you like the look of.

4. Decorations & Accents

Looks great, doesn't it? But .... could it look even better?

Save decorations and accents - things like jewelry, stars, or fabric embellishments for the very last. Then, as you add them, you can move them between other layers of shadow and highlight already created to help keep your illustration looking realistic.

When you're all done with your illustration, save it as both a .psd and a web-ready format like .jpg. This way, you can always go back and make adjustments without having to start from scratch.