Blended pencil painting

I've never learnt to paint traditionally. Growing up I was more of a pen and pencil kid (and sometimes pastels), and even to this day I still break out in a cold sweat with brush in hand and a blank canvas.

So when it comes to painting digitally, sometimes I just have to go with what I know. This technique has more in common with using watercolour pencils rather than with paint. For this digital painting I started with a fairly detailed, shaded pencil drawing (see previous post) which had most of the information I needed for lights and darks. I guess a traditionally taught painter would just use this sketch as a guide and paint opaquely over the top, building up tones with the paint (be it traditionally or digitally) but instead I blend the pencil tones into the shaded colour layer, like you would do with watercolour pencils, to end up with a fairly good 'impersonation' of a painting. Below is a timelapse video of it's creation.



I used Photoshop, with the pencils on a multiply layer, colours on another. Once the basic colour shading was achieved, the image was flattened and blended together. It tends to get a bit soft and smudgy at this stage so afterwards I go in and add back some hard shading and some finer details which were lost in the blending stage. The touch up process is probably the closest I get to traditional painting methods, but it only counts for a small part of the overall painting as all the hard work was taken care of in the pencil stage.

This method is pretty similar to my Paperboy tutorial, but with the Painter step now done in Photoshop.