Sean Guzman

Digital Painting Series: Making Your Art Pop in Photoshop

Hi Dana, two things first, excellent work on this painting! Especially as you say this is your first "real" digital painting. I am impressed with how good it came out, and great choice of reference! The reference has a good breakdown of subtle light and shadow, nice side lighting, and is quite clear. Not only have you captured the likeness, but your digital painting has a "painter like" quality to it as well. I can see where you have simplified the value structure and focused on the big picture here, from the cloth pulling over her shoulder, to the subtle variation of tone as the 3d forms get closer to facing the light from the shadows. You can see this in that shoulder area, but also along her face and cheek. Back to your value structure, it is well thought out. If you want to push this more you could even darken your shadows further with a quick levels adjustment, pushing the darks, hiding it, and painting in the shadow areas. Since your values are already working together well, this will only heighten the "3D" illusion. Because you have good use of edge work in your painting, you've got the hardest part of painting done right. What I would recommend as far as your painting is to soften areas where light meets shadow as you continue with your future paintings, or this one. Like for example along the hair line at the top left. Simply take a softer brush and blend together the hairline with her scalp/forehead to further achieve the illusion of the hair growing out of her head. Or along the arm facing the light. As the arm gets further away from that side light, you could subtly make the value darker, and soften the edge down the arm. I mention this small thing because a good point of note is to remember that as something gets further from the light, even if it is facing the light, it will get subtly darker in value. Overall your work has unified as a whole very well and has a clear sense of depth with how you rendered your light and shadow, and your attention to hard and soft painting. Great job. When looking at your color choice, I appreciate how you played around with your own scheme of color, and that it is not to monotone but has a nice transition of hue (this can especially be seen in her forearm area at the top right, where it goes from very warm to "purply cool"). What I would encourage you to do is to continue to push the color variation a little more, and when doing color variation, if we want to make it look "real" still and not too colorful, push back the saturation (this also depends on what we are painting, if we're painting a lollipop the saturation would be higher of course). Like for this painting specifically, adding the slightest hints of desaturated green along with adding in a desaturation layer via hue/saturation and toning down the red. This is good practice which will be very effective when getting into painting human skin. Dana, as I said great work! I am glad the class was helpful to you. Please continue your paintings, you are already doing great starting out and since you are already running keep on going!

my digital painting in photoshop and sketchbook pro.
Statue by Philippe Faraut
any critique is welcome since this is my first 'real' digital painting

Marble statue

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