Demo Painting...

Last night I had the opportunity to do a quick demo for the Illustration Club at UVU. For this demo I wanted to show my initial steps for creating digital paintings in Photoshop CS5. I had about 30-45 minutes to work so I had to work faster than I usually like to. This isn't meant to be a full tutorial but quick guide into my process.

Step one: I open a previously scanned image in photoshop.
Step two: I separate the line art from the white background.
Step three: I create new layer and fill it with 50-70%  gray. I place this layer underneath the line art.  Step four: I create a new layer and sandwich it in between the gray layer and my line art.This is the layer that I will start to block in my ruff values. When I'm blocking in the values I stay zoomed out and use a large brush. This step should only a couple of minutes.
Step five: Starts after I'm finished blocking in ruff values. For this step I create a layer above all of my art work, I call this my overpaint layer. On this layer I will paint out the line art. Also I start varying my brush size and start to zoom in and out to get a little more detailed. This is the layer where I start to blend the brush strokes.
Step six: When I am happy with my grayscale painting I start glazing color over the grayscale image. I do this by using multiply and color layers. After I have the colors blocked in I flatten my image and continue to refine the painting.