Missing Manny - A Photoshop Tutorial

Originally Published on Blog O' the Baroness

The illustration on the right was for the little reader The Case of the Missing Manny, which was done for Imagine Learning. It happens on the set of a pirate movie, so this picture goes with the page when our detective Ace is interviewing Bob the costume designer. Bob, btw, hates pirates and wishes he could design costumes for sci-fi movies.

I've put together a big ol' tutorial on how I made this illustration. I tried keep it at the level of expecting the reader to know at least the basics of Photoshop, but if you are an expert at Photoshop, then a lot of the information will be old hat. If I've left big holes in my explanations, let me know and I'll be happy to make some edits.

Tools 

These are the brushes I will be referring to throughout the tutorial. I am pretty lazy with brushes - I stick with what works. All three brushes are in the default brush palette. The only customizing I've done is to save a couple more spatter brushes at smaller sizes. When I'm in a real hurry while shading, I'll just use the soft round brushes. The downside is that you get a slick airbrushy look that I don't always like. The spatter brushes give me a little texture to the brush strokes.

Some other general type information - I have two different setups. At my Imagine Learning office, I work on a PC. I have two 1200x1600 LCD monitors, an Intuos Wacom tablet, and Photoshop CS2. There's a screenshot of my desktop a little further down. At home I have essentially the same setup, only with a G5 mac and PS CS3. I personally prefer the mac over pc, but I've worked with both for so long, that it's not an issue for me. (Speaking of apple love, recently got an iphone and they are pretty much lots of awesome .)

This whole illustration was done in Photoshop from start to finish. Sometimes I use Flash or Painter, but for this tutorial, everything I refer to is happening in Photoshop, and I'll be using PC commands. If you use a mac, just replace Ctrl with Cmd.

Thumbnail

Here is my first sketch, which is essentially a thumbnail, even though it is done at actual size but lower resolution (72 dpi). I'm using a small round brush. It looks like it was maybe at 30% opacity. I’m not consistent with that. This first sketch is just to figure out what is happening in the scene and work out the general composition. Before starting any sketches for the project, I had already done some research, finding pictures of costume studios, pirate costumes, etc. to help come up with ideas.