SKETCHBOOK MOBILE TUTORIAL finished
Since the iPad arrived, people started to focus on it as the fingerpainting tool. It is indeed, but it is common to forget the powerful tool we always have in our pocket: the iPhone. An iPhone with Sketchbook mobile loaded is the heaven for any artist out there. Sketchbook mobile, from 3GS version, gives you a very good resolution (1024x682) and you can always send yourself the PSD file, so there's no excuse to create on the fly. In this tutorial I want to share with you some of my tricks and methods by painting a mug of coffee to show you how easy is to turn daily subject into art by combining your little big canvas with Sketchbook Mobile. So, let's start...
Starting Since I used my iPod Touch, I realized that sketching is not (in most cases) the way to go. In most cases, we will draw at the size we are comfortable with, and often, the screen size will have control over the art we are making, and as we want to express with our art, we need to control the canvas and not opposite. I'll give you an example: try to write onscreen "Sketchbook Mobile is the best App". Probably you only could have "Sketchbook Mobile is". Now, choose a bigger brush size and draw 6 blocks (more or less the words size) and in another layer write the right word in place...see? It fits now. So, that's my method: Blocking instead of sketching as the very first step.
In the very first steps we have to avoid the fear of ruining things out, cause there's nothing to ruin (yet :) ). So, add colors, shapes, layers...try to match composition and color the more 'accurate' possible and don't worry about details (that's the reason of our fear to ruin). In these three steps I tried to match the overall color and added a new layer for the mug. I used the round brush with different sizes and opacity for this rough part.
The Color Wheel A very useful and powerful tool is the color wheel's Hue, Saturation and Bright mode. It's really helpful to use the color picker to select a tone and only change one of these three values. In this case, I let Saturation intact and change the Bright value. The result is the same hue with the same desaturation but darker for the coffee 'line' under the foam.
The Zoom I'm always zooming in and out, no matter if I'm working with the iPad or the iPhone. To me, zooming is not a matter of resizing things but a way of stepping back. Keeping the right overall composition is a must to me, so almost every three strokes, I zoom out just to see if what I've just done fit with the rest of the painting.
The Circle Tool The different kind of drawing tools, such as the circle, square and straight line, are so helpful sometimes. If you use them too much, your painting might look soulless, but don't think you're cheating, people use pictures to add elements-textures, so what's wrong with a strong & straight line? :) In the screenshot, you can see I used the circle tool to shape the plate as this will be a very useful guide for the overal perspective, duplicated it and resized for the centered part. I also added the cookies and add a reddish tone to the coffee by picking the reds around and apply them with low opacity to control the flow.
For the mug's rim I needed something more textured than a simple line to make it look like glass. So I picked the 13th brush on the 3rd page. This brush is stunning for hair, but it worked perfect for my needs.
Once I have my rim ellipse, I delete it by parts with a small brush tip (e.g. Pencil) so now I have a guide not only for the glass shape itself but for its bright and shadow tones. Sometimes it is helpful to duplicate the layer so you can control the intensity of the lines by deleting parts on the duplicated one.
The Spoon Although my advice is to work from outside to inside, I mean, from the general to the detail, sometimes it happens that a detail is so evident, fast and easy than before your brain could realize you're drawing it, it'll be done. In this case it happened with the spoon. Orangish stroke, another black one and white-bluish fine line for the bright (you'll see these extremes in metallic stuff).
The picture in the right shows some experiments I made to find a perfect brush tip to represent foam. I'll explain that later in this tutorial.
The Cookies An effective painting (if you're looking for a realistic effect) consist not in making everything look perfect as a photo but in playing with the viewer's eye. You want to draw/paint those elements (mostly little details) which the viewer will recognize as realistic points. In this case, I'll work the cookies' grain first and then, their 'cracks'. As you can see in the picture, I have my cookies ready with a very rough light-shadow color. If I add the little cracks now, the resulting cookies will look like a lizard (lizard's cookies? tasty! :) ) so I need to add some grain and after a few tests, I finally find the perfect brush for it (see the images below). In the third screenshot, you can see how I played with the noise and the jitter. This helps for randomness.
Now, the very important part is to make it believable. Just painting with a dotted brush will let you that: dots, so the trick is to pick the color generated 'in-between' and paint again...and again... Until you'll have the desired texture.
In this point, I realized that the cookies are too saturated and they don't seem to belong to the scene. To fix this what I do is: -Pick a shadow tone in the plate (as they're on it). -Paint a bit on the cookie with the dotted brush. -Then, pick the resulting color as in the previous step and paint again (low opacity). You'll have the cookie's color perfectly mixed with plate's shadows tone...and a bit more desaturated.
Once you're done, let's move a step further and add magic in 2 minutes (or less!) to our tasty cookies. After a quick research, I found the brush to go
The 4th brush in the second page is perfect for the effect that I want. I needed to play with the sliders (I mean: having fun) of the space, noise, angle and jitter. It's just a matter of trying different ways of the same brush. The rest of the values were Sized 100 and Opacity 100 as well. Now, and this is important, I just touched with one shot. Otherwise the texture will result fuzzy (kitty cookies? Hehe) What we need to do next is: - Delete the non-desired brush stroke around the cookies. - Choose the pencil, small sized with about 16% opacity and pick in the light tone. - Follow the some parts of some strokes and you're done (see images in the next page).
Clean the stroke.
Add some light using the pencil taking the textured stroke as a path.
The Handle The perfect way to manage a painting is treating it as a whole. What I mean is that instead of focusing in one element, you'll need to build everything step by step so your piece will have cohesion (if you change the light intensity you must retouch the shadows...don't you?) I'm saying this to explain that I'll go back in time to explain the handle process (the cookies aren't finished at this point) Painting crystal (glass) reflections is very fun and enjoyable...and the final result is always stunning. The way to go is to understand the shapes you're seeing inside the glass instead of taking them as reflections. Could you reproduce this?:
Three shapes (different to each other), three colors... But easily recognizable. Painting Crystal is more of a understanding work than a painter skills' task.
I'm taking this general view so you can see what I did at this stage. The more evident changes are the foam at the top and the glass-look of the mug's rim. For the rim, I just picked colors that are already in the painting. I just used that ellipse guide to add the color. With the foam, I just picked pastel tones to transmit how tasty it was and give it a soft look. You can see I worked a bit more on the handle and the contrast between the table and the mug. Another detail is the reflection of the cookie in the mug, see what I mean? Although the mug and the plate seems unfinished and non defined, this detail is helping a lot.
Here you can see the process of the handle. It is always amazing to me the fact that simple strokes of different colors and sizes can work together this great. Notice that I was picking colors from around the mug to add life to the handle and transparency by seeing colors through the handle. The light in the bottom of the mug gives the painting a huge sense of light. I picked the colors from the light zone in the upper zone, making just three or four totally white dots.
Final Steps and thoughts. In this final stage, I added the foam texture. I used the brush in the pics above with that particular settings that give me the randomness I need. I just picked the color and painted over it with the new brush, specially between light and shadow parts (where light lets you 'see' the texture). I didn't like too much how the straight line in the background was interacting with the subject, and I thought that, as the subject is the mug, painting the table edge wasn't a need, so I started playing with the different colors and I do like more this way of presenting the mug. Hope this tutorial was helpful, at least a bit. Thanks for the read! Luis Peso
Starting Since I used my iPod Touch, I realized that sketching is not (in most cases) the way to go. In most cases, we will draw at the size we are comfortable with, and often, the screen size will have control over the art we are making, and as we want to express with our art, we need to control the canvas and not opposite. I'll give you an example: try to write onscreen "Sketchbook Mobile is the best App". Probably you only could have "Sketchbook Mobile is". Now, choose a bigger brush size and draw 6 blocks (more or less the words size) and in another layer write the right word in place...see? It fits now. So, that's my method: Blocking instead of sketching as the very first step.
In the very first steps we have to avoid the fear of ruining things out, cause there's nothing to ruin (yet :) ). So, add colors, shapes, layers...try to match composition and color the more 'accurate' possible and don't worry about details (that's the reason of our fear to ruin). In these three steps I tried to match the overall color and added a new layer for the mug. I used the round brush with different sizes and opacity for this rough part.
The Color Wheel A very useful and powerful tool is the color wheel's Hue, Saturation and Bright mode. It's really helpful to use the color picker to select a tone and only change one of these three values. In this case, I let Saturation intact and change the Bright value. The result is the same hue with the same desaturation but darker for the coffee 'line' under the foam.
The Zoom I'm always zooming in and out, no matter if I'm working with the iPad or the iPhone. To me, zooming is not a matter of resizing things but a way of stepping back. Keeping the right overall composition is a must to me, so almost every three strokes, I zoom out just to see if what I've just done fit with the rest of the painting.
The Circle Tool The different kind of drawing tools, such as the circle, square and straight line, are so helpful sometimes. If you use them too much, your painting might look soulless, but don't think you're cheating, people use pictures to add elements-textures, so what's wrong with a strong & straight line? :) In the screenshot, you can see I used the circle tool to shape the plate as this will be a very useful guide for the overal perspective, duplicated it and resized for the centered part. I also added the cookies and add a reddish tone to the coffee by picking the reds around and apply them with low opacity to control the flow.
For the mug's rim I needed something more textured than a simple line to make it look like glass. So I picked the 13th brush on the 3rd page. This brush is stunning for hair, but it worked perfect for my needs.
Once I have my rim ellipse, I delete it by parts with a small brush tip (e.g. Pencil) so now I have a guide not only for the glass shape itself but for its bright and shadow tones. Sometimes it is helpful to duplicate the layer so you can control the intensity of the lines by deleting parts on the duplicated one.
The Spoon Although my advice is to work from outside to inside, I mean, from the general to the detail, sometimes it happens that a detail is so evident, fast and easy than before your brain could realize you're drawing it, it'll be done. In this case it happened with the spoon. Orangish stroke, another black one and white-bluish fine line for the bright (you'll see these extremes in metallic stuff).
The picture in the right shows some experiments I made to find a perfect brush tip to represent foam. I'll explain that later in this tutorial.
The Cookies An effective painting (if you're looking for a realistic effect) consist not in making everything look perfect as a photo but in playing with the viewer's eye. You want to draw/paint those elements (mostly little details) which the viewer will recognize as realistic points. In this case, I'll work the cookies' grain first and then, their 'cracks'. As you can see in the picture, I have my cookies ready with a very rough light-shadow color. If I add the little cracks now, the resulting cookies will look like a lizard (lizard's cookies? tasty! :) ) so I need to add some grain and after a few tests, I finally find the perfect brush for it (see the images below). In the third screenshot, you can see how I played with the noise and the jitter. This helps for randomness.
Now, the very important part is to make it believable. Just painting with a dotted brush will let you that: dots, so the trick is to pick the color generated 'in-between' and paint again...and again... Until you'll have the desired texture.
In this point, I realized that the cookies are too saturated and they don't seem to belong to the scene. To fix this what I do is: -Pick a shadow tone in the plate (as they're on it). -Paint a bit on the cookie with the dotted brush. -Then, pick the resulting color as in the previous step and paint again (low opacity). You'll have the cookie's color perfectly mixed with plate's shadows tone...and a bit more desaturated.
Once you're done, let's move a step further and add magic in 2 minutes (or less!) to our tasty cookies. After a quick research, I found the brush to go
The 4th brush in the second page is perfect for the effect that I want. I needed to play with the sliders (I mean: having fun) of the space, noise, angle and jitter. It's just a matter of trying different ways of the same brush. The rest of the values were Sized 100 and Opacity 100 as well. Now, and this is important, I just touched with one shot. Otherwise the texture will result fuzzy (kitty cookies? Hehe) What we need to do next is: - Delete the non-desired brush stroke around the cookies. - Choose the pencil, small sized with about 16% opacity and pick in the light tone. - Follow the some parts of some strokes and you're done (see images in the next page).
Clean the stroke.
Add some light using the pencil taking the textured stroke as a path.
The Handle The perfect way to manage a painting is treating it as a whole. What I mean is that instead of focusing in one element, you'll need to build everything step by step so your piece will have cohesion (if you change the light intensity you must retouch the shadows...don't you?) I'm saying this to explain that I'll go back in time to explain the handle process (the cookies aren't finished at this point) Painting crystal (glass) reflections is very fun and enjoyable...and the final result is always stunning. The way to go is to understand the shapes you're seeing inside the glass instead of taking them as reflections. Could you reproduce this?:
Three shapes (different to each other), three colors... But easily recognizable. Painting Crystal is more of a understanding work than a painter skills' task.
I'm taking this general view so you can see what I did at this stage. The more evident changes are the foam at the top and the glass-look of the mug's rim. For the rim, I just picked colors that are already in the painting. I just used that ellipse guide to add the color. With the foam, I just picked pastel tones to transmit how tasty it was and give it a soft look. You can see I worked a bit more on the handle and the contrast between the table and the mug. Another detail is the reflection of the cookie in the mug, see what I mean? Although the mug and the plate seems unfinished and non defined, this detail is helping a lot.
Here you can see the process of the handle. It is always amazing to me the fact that simple strokes of different colors and sizes can work together this great. Notice that I was picking colors from around the mug to add life to the handle and transparency by seeing colors through the handle. The light in the bottom of the mug gives the painting a huge sense of light. I picked the colors from the light zone in the upper zone, making just three or four totally white dots.
Final Steps and thoughts. In this final stage, I added the foam texture. I used the brush in the pics above with that particular settings that give me the randomness I need. I just picked the color and painted over it with the new brush, specially between light and shadow parts (where light lets you 'see' the texture). I didn't like too much how the straight line in the background was interacting with the subject, and I thought that, as the subject is the mug, painting the table edge wasn't a need, so I started playing with the different colors and I do like more this way of presenting the mug. Hope this tutorial was helpful, at least a bit. Thanks for the read! Luis Peso
