This sketch of the gnome with his lantern and cricket was an offshoot of some product design I worked on for a collectibles client. I'll use it as a basis for a demo using Painter and Photoshop.


The scene will be warmly lit by the gnome's firefly lantern and the sky will provide a cool backlight. One look at my portfolio and you can see I like the drama generated by playing warm and cool light off one another.


I start by scanning the drawing into Photoshop as a 300 dpi grayscale image. Using the grayscale setting eliminates a lot of unnecessary information and gives a better scan image to work with. Be aware that a lot of shading on a sketch will block your view of layers below later on.

I do some minor quick clean up and then duplicate the layer twice by dragging it to the new layers tab on the bottom of the layers pallette. With the sketch on its own layer I set the layer style to Multiply to give me a see through version of the sketch. The second copy's visibility is turned off and saved as a backup just in case I need a copy of the drawing later on.


Because I like to work on a toned background I select a nice greyed down tan color and fill the bottom layer. Change the image mode to RGB in order to be able to use all of the special effects type of stuff in both programs, CMYK is not supported. Be sure to save the file.

Initial Lay-In