Using Brushes to draw an Animal

4/26/20

    As day 7 of a 9-day PS challenge this week, we had to use brushes to draw and texture something. Since I had been following a wildlife theme for the Play@Home series, I chose the little mouse from Pixabay shown at the bottom of the page. First, I made colored shapes for each part of his body, starting at the rear and moving forward; tail, feet, body, legs, etc., all the day to the tip of his nose. So, I started off with about 15 layers. 

    Then, over most layers (clipped to each), I added a new layer and used an Aaron Blaise fur brush to add the hair texture, brushing in the direction of the fur. The brush is set up to jitter between the foreground and background colors automatically. The only things that didn’t get fur was the inner ear, eyeballs and the tip if the nose. So, add another 12 or so layers. 

    Now came the shaping layers, two for each body part — one for highlights and one for shadows. My imaginary light comes from the top right. Again, I clipped the layers to the part below, and used a large soft brush to add lights and darks. I mostly used a soft light blend mode, added additional Gaussian blur and lowered opacity on both the light and shadow layers. I added catchlight to his eyes with a small soft brush in white. It’s amazing how two little dabs of white can make a character come “alive”.

    I added three different green papers under all the mouse layers (now ground in folders or organization) with different blend modes using a plug-n called Adobe Paper Texture Pro, turned them into a smart object and then added a vignette in the raw filter. I added what I call a ground shadow where his feet touch the ground and a cast shadow from the light source. To make the cast shadow more realistic, I add a tilt shift blur (after converting to smart object) from the Blur Gallery so the shadow is more blurred need the end than at the base. Then I add a gradient mask in black to transparent so the shadow lightens as it moves away from its source. Study some shadows to see how they change as they get farther from whatever makes them; and how they differ as the object moves farther from the light source.

    The image didn’t look quite finished, so I found a chunk of cheese on Adobe stock; re-colored it to match the shaping on the mouse, and added the shadow. Now, it looked done.