How I create a catalog cover illustration

[Gavin]

That's really cool! My late father was an pen & ink illustrator in his early years, became a master with photoshop, and melding things into photoshop towards the end of his career. Used to do a bunch of catalogs for employee rewards and industrial parts. It is no oil painting but lots of skill & judgement involved. 

[Johnsfolly]

Very impressive Al. Thanks for the tutorial.

[DADAKOTA]

The good Lord has truly blessed you with a talent.  Amazing.

[Flysmallie]

Cool stuff. Photoshop is a great tool. It gets a bad rap a lot of times because everyone wants to say that things are photoshopped when it looks too good. And maybe some things are but I don't think people making those claims understand the talent and skill required to pull off something like what Al has done. I use it everyday for graphics at work and at home for some of my photography stuff. 

[ness]

42 minutes ago, Flysmallie said:

Cool stuff. Photoshop is a great tool. It gets a bad rap a lot of times because everyone wants to say that things are photoshopped when it looks too good. And maybe some things are but I don't think people making those claims understand the talent and skill required to pull off something like what Al has done. I use it everyday for graphics at work and at home for some of my photography stuff. 

Agree -- but there is an awful lot of over-processed or just phony-looking photography out there.The HDR stuff is kind of a pet peeve of mine.

But what Al is producing and graphic work is certainly not in that category. 

[Flysmallie]

13 minutes ago, ness said:

Agree -- but there is an awful lot of over-processed or just phony-looking photography out there.The HDR stuff is kind of a pet peeve of mine.

Totally understand that. It can be overused for sure. And you can overdo the effect too. I do a lot of HS sports and mine get ran through some filters because of the look I'm trying to achieve. I'm not trying to do typical sports photography. there are plenty of people sitting on the baseline taking the same shots over and over again. I try to capture something different.

But the whole animosity some have to photo editing really upsets me at times. I have a pic I took a month or two ago of a basketball player that some people just can't believe is an actual photo. They think it's a compilation like what Al has done. I have zero problems with compilations. I do them all the time and like the challenge of making them look like something cool. But I don't like every exceptionally good photo to automatically be assumed that I created it in PS. That is my pet peeve. If these people understood the amount of time I spent with this kid trying to get this shot that I dreamed up in my mind they would fall over. The nights that were spent waiting on the right conditions. He was probably tired of it. His mom was definitely tired of waiting on me to produce something. But then everything lined up one night and we were able to make it happen. But it still wasn't easy. Blocking traffic, raining, cold, dark, poor kid had to change clothes on a sidewalk. And then have people tell me that it's a nice compilation. BS. And just because it was an awesome picture. But that's the American way, we have to burn down greatness.

[Foghorn]

You should see some of his paper mache and the scratchboard work he does. He might be the reason for all those C- grades I got in art class. That, plus I have no talent in that field of work. Awesome job as usual Al.  

[Al Agnew]

Here are three of my images.  Quick quiz...one, two, or all three were produced in Photoshop.   I did NOT use any photos at all in producing the one, two, or three that were done in Photoshop, it was all done using the Photoshop brush tools starting with a blank screen.  Which were done in Photoshop, and which, if any, were done as traditional paintings?

[Al Agnew]

The other way I use Photoshop is to plan and compose actual paintings.  Back in the old days, I'd usually start planning a painting by either looking through all the reference photos I've taken over the years, looking for something that turned me on as a starting point; it might be either an animal photo or a landscape photo that looked interesting.  Then I'd look for an animal to fit into the landscape, or a landscape to put behind the animal.  Then I'd start doing little quick sketches, drawing and redrawing the animal in different sizes compared to the background, and in different positions compared to the background as well.  I might end up doing a dozen or more of these little sketches, changing elements of the background, changing pieces of the animal like making a leg come farther forward or turning a head some more one way, before finally settling on a composition I liked.  Then, if it was a complex painting with plenty of different colors in my head, I might do a small (like 8 X 10 inch) quick painting to work out the colors, with little or no detail, just major blocks of color.  I might spend a day just doing that.  Then I would start drawing the animal and landscape, the size of the finished painting, on paper.  This would be a very detailed drawing of the animal, and doing such a drawing might take a couple days to get it right, especially if I'd changed a lot of stuff from my original photo or photos.  One thing that I'd have to work out at this stage was the lighting.  I might have a landscape with sunlight coming in over my left shoulder, but my animal photo had the animal in cloudy weather so that there were no strong shadows on it, or it was in sunlight but coming from a different angle.  I actually have a number of little toy models of animals like wolves that I've picked up over the years, and I might be able to pick out one of them that was in a position similar to the one I was going to paint, and shine a light on it to see both what the shape of the shadows on its body was, and what the shape of the shadow it threw on the ground was.  But usually I wouldn't have a model that was anywhere close, so I'd take the time to sculpt one out of modeling clay, and shine the light on it.  

Once I got the drawing done, I would transfer it to canvas and begin painting.

Now, here is the compositional image for a painting I just started.  It began as before...I knew I wanted to paint a wolf, but needed a landscape to fit it into.  So I looked through my photos and came upon one I'd taken last autumn off the Beartooth Highway in Montana.  There was gorgeous autumn colors on the foliage, but it was snowing fairly heavily, a gray, misty day.  That photo is the background of the composition, up to the rock that the wolf is standing upon.  But the foreground in that photo wasn't going to work, so I found another photo taken the same day in the same area that had this nice rock in the foreground, and that's the rock in the composition.  But the foreground needed some more interest...I wanted to get some of that deep red foliage in the foreground, and also needed something else.  A third photo I had from that day had some closeup foliage, and another one had that nice log.  So...I took pieces of those photos, cut them out in Photoshop, and composed the painting's background and foreground.

Now for the wolf...I had a photo of a captive wolf on a gray day that I really liked, but it was more of a closeup, with the lower legs and tail cropped off.  I found another photo of a wolf standing broadside like that one, but showing the lower legs and paws.  I cut them off and stuck them onto the other wolf.  Then I decided that the head of the original wolf wasn't quite the way I wanted it, so I found another wolf photo in my collection that had a nice head, and morphed it onto my original wolf.  Then I played around with the size of the wolf compared to the background, zooming in or out in Photoshop, and also moving it around in the composition...all this, that would have taken me hours doing little sketches in the old days, took just a few minutes in Photoshop, and I could make very small adjustments that made a difference in the composition but I would never had done just sketching.  So after a couple hours of work, with more sitting and studying the image than actually drawing or painting, I had a composition I was pleased with.  I could, at this point, have further adjusted the color of the wolf...you'll note that the lower legs are a different color than the rest of the wolf and so is the head.  But I didn't see the need to do that...it will be done in the actual painting.  I then stuck a grid over my image in Photoshop, and used graph paper to draw the image the size it would be in the final canvas, making a few adjustments to the wolf as I drew it.  Transferred it to canvas and started painting.  The whole process took a short day, instead of several days.

[Deadstream]

Guess #1 is PS.    #2 and 3  amazing paintings.   I really can't tell.