Photoshop Help

QuickTime Screen Capture

My friend James wondered if I might be able to throw up a DEMO on my digital painting process. I said I can’t because my old screen capture software no longer works on new IOS… and that got me thinking. After a quick investigation I discovered a little known feature on all Macs… Quicktime will do screen capture, so here is something I threw together super fast for James.

My process is really simple. I draw my pictures traditionally. Scan them into my computer (Photoshop) and make the DRAWING a MULTIPLY layer so I can see through it. I work on the layer BELOW to block in colors and put the finishing touches on the layer ABOVE the drawing. Pretty simple…. and the music is a clip from something my youngest son Pete wrote and produced.

Making Word Balloons With Photoshop

A few of you folks have asked me how I make word balloons using Photoshop, so as I was doing final edits on THE FEW, I flipped on the camera and recorded the process hoping that a brilliant tutorial would magically happen! Unfortunately, all that happened was me recording myself babbling aimlessly as I try to string two words together that make some kind of sense. I even called something a “shape maker” which I don’t think is an official Adobe term… for anything. So don’t think of this video as a tutorial. Think of it as spending a couple of minutes looking over Dennis’s shoulder while he works.

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My Surface Pro 4 Review

Several years ago I did a job for Mission Hockey and as part of the payment process I received a bunch of their latest hockey gear. For some reason my wife is not fond of this sort of compensation package (she seems to be a big fan of hard cold cash) but I loved it …and I’m STILL using those Mission hockey gloves!

I just finished another job that had a unique payout at the end. This time I got one of those new Surface Pro 4 Tablets. For years I’ve been looking for SOMETHING PORTABLE that I can digitally paint with and the Surface Pro 4 claims it can fill that bill… so I gave it a test drive to see.

Because I use an older version of Photoshop (CS6) I had to jump through a couple of hoops, but basically got it loaded onto the tablet with no problem. The Surface Pro 4 comes ready to use out of the box with a pen and screen sensitivity, so using the 8 megapixel camera on the device, I snapped a picture of a crumpled up sermon note that was in the trash can, opened it in Photoshop and got busy. To make a long story short, it worked great. (I write really short reviews) I can now sit in front of the tv with a full blown version of Photoshop on my lap and make goofy pictures with it. I’m really impressed…

…and oh, did I mention it’s also a pretty slick little gaming computer. It runs Steam games really well to boot.

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Flying The Coop

This is for my friends on YouTube who continue to send me kind letters asking what my work process is.

This picture started out as a doodle in my sketchbook. I scanned it into Photoshop, (CS6), made it a multiply layer and began blocking in color on a normal layer underneath. When I get the mid and darker values established, I create a normal layer above the line art and put in the lighter values. At the very end I add just a little black line but not too much… too much black will kill the picture. I merge all the layers together, then create a green layer underneath the art. I erase everything I dont want on the art. As I do this, the green layer underneath helps me to see what I am doing. My image is cut out and now I need a background. I type into Google “blue sky” and find some clouds which I drop into the background. I add just a bit of glow around my figure to separate him from the background and I’m done.