Tutorial Painting Tigerlilies

Tutorial Index

			This painting was done in a 8x10 canvas size (2400 x 3000 pixels) at a 300 Dpi resolution. You could paint it on a small scale if you don't plan to print it later on, but you will have to set up your brush size accordingly to your canvas dimension. OK, first download and install the brushes preset and the texture, and the drawing if you intend to use the same one, but you could very well use your own. If you do use your own, make sure the line art is floating as an object, we only use it as a guide here and do not merge it or blend it with our painting.
			Ok, first thing we have to do, before planning our color palette is our light source. As we know from nature, a flower is always turn to the sun, so my light source has to be on the top right side. And since the light source is from the upper right corner, the opposite of it would be the bottom left corner for the shadow since the object that is the flower will be blocking the light source and will produce our shadow. Since our light source is on the right upper corner and shadow at bottom left our cast shadow will also be at bottom but on the same side as the light source, the color of cast shadow are is shade tone since it only received very low light from the light source. Now for the light reflection, it would come from above and as bright as the light source itself, just like the cast shadow from the shadow itself. So the left side is for the shadow and the right side if for our light source. We will look more deeply at it later on, since there is must more involve to it.
Before you decide the color of your background, you will have to decide what color you are going to use for yours. So we need to go hunting for photo of lilies, if you don't have a real lily in front of you. The photo provide here are from " Dans Mon Jardins", they could only be use as a guide for painting and not to be use on the web. Thanks to Dans Mon Jardins for providing me with such great photos. Click on the thumbnail of your choice to view the at bigger size and right click to save it on your hard drive, we will also use them to make our color palette from it. So decide what color you would like to make your flower and then we will work from it. You may choose your own photo if you have some.



			Now that we have decide of our light source, and the color we want to paint our flower, we are going to work on our background, I did wanted a kind of a studio look to make my flower stand out more and I already know that I would like to have my flower to be the classic orange one. This is why I did choose a blue tone to make the flower stand out and wanted a contrast background. So by using the complementary color, if I look at my color chart and the complementary color for orange is blue. You may prefer to choose a background color is the same color but in different value either in warm or in cool colors. Your other possibilities is to paint an analogous painting, ex: Red, orange, and yellow are analogous because red and yellow make orange. OK, now that we have made all those decision, we can start working on the background. The brush setting for the background are not provide with the brush preset. Bristle brush: shape: Round Size:15 Transparency:0 Brush head: 10 Density: 30 Random: 98 Like in the example on the left I started to paint the darkest tone of my blue around the edge on my background. I did my stroke in diagonal from top right going to bottom left, to keep the same flow of stroke as the light source.
Color: multi color. Delta hue:0 Delta Saturation:3 Delta brightness:6 Tab Advance: Spacing: 1 Fade in/out: 0
			Now I change my color to a medium tone value and start painting a bit overlapping my dark tone blue going forward .
			Now for the middle part of the background I changer it to a lighter tone value.
			Retouch Smear brush Tab advance; Spacing: 1 Tab Option; Smear: 100 Transparency: 100 Wet Option Selected. I blend my color together keeping my stroke in the same diagonal as I did apply the paint.
			Now with the Drop Water brush. I just touch my brush on the canvas not making any motion stroke, just to thin and mix the paint. Drop Water brush Tab advance; Spacing: 54 up to 110 ( your prefer choice) Tab Shape: Shape: round Size: 80 and more Soft Edge: 100 Water drop tool is a bit tricky to paint with, since we did paint with a multi color brush, when we do apply the drop water brush it does pick up those multi color and to our surprise we do get colors that we never suspect to have on our canvas. As you will see, you may get a color you don't much like to have it there, keep on touching the canvas around it and going forward to it to change it's color. We could always fix it later.
			Here is the fixing I'm talking about, the top right corner that I need to be more lighter did kept getting more grey with the drop water brush. In other to fix this, I did use the gritty charcoal brush same size with about a transparency at 65 and a very light blue color that is almost white and touch my canvas to just have paint over the part I wanted to be more lighter.
			Then I use the drop water brush over the charcoal to blend it in. Here is a closer up of the canvas after I use the drop water tool to give you an idea what it could look like.
			The thing is, when you are using the drop water tool, it does take your texture from the paint you have apply. This is why I decided to apply a texture to the background by using the texture filter in PI. The image of the texture01, is a texture I have made from a water color paper, you will have to add your texture to your texture selection by clicking on the arrow and then I did use the setting on the left. I didn't want to have a big emboss on my background to take away from my flower, but just a subtle one, this is why my transparency is at 20 and the level and kept the level at the highest, I could have chose a lower level and a higher transparency number but that would give me more grey which I didn't want with the blues I had here. Play with the setting and click on your preview when satisfied with it click ok. I may not have told you yet, but please do save often, and every time save as a different naming. What I also do when working this size of canvas and bigger, I do clear my clip board, it free up some memory ram and also when I'm sure I don't need my undo's I clear the history of my undo's and of course don't run other program with PI. Specially my mail program and messenger. It keeps PI from lagging and even frizzing up on me.
			This is what we have so far on the left. The image below show you a close up of what the background look like after we apply the filter with the texture01. You may want or prefer to use an other texture, it is up to you. It is your painting and your decision to make it the way you would like.
			OK. Now let go back and more in detail about our light in our painting. The red horizontal line is the horizon and the red dot on it are for my vanishing points. The yellow circle is my focus point for my light source and rays are the light source direction. As you could see on the example on the left I did start from the middle of my focus point going toward my object and touching a certain part tips of my petals and edge so this will help me when I will paint. I haven't put all the line for each part of the flower here, but just enough to give you an idea and for the other line, try to visualize them. The blue circle is my shadow vanishing point. And as I did for the light source expend the rays from it. The two blue line starting on the horizontal line at the two vanishing point going down and toward the middle where there to help me define where to put my shadow vanishing point. Since I won't paint the ground of the flower I don't need to establish my ground plane.
			Ok this is what we should see, if you did make those line to help you out, merge them as a single object, so you could easily refer to it when you need it. Save again, I may not tell you every time to save but please do it often. Now let move on to the next page. We did pretty good so far, and most of our decision have been made already.