Steem Cartoon: How I Painted this Piece in Photoshop

Hi all!

Happy Friday!

Today I'd like to share a piece I worked on for most of my day yesterday. It's a digital painting of my Tugboat crew - some characters who you are hopefully familiar with by now!

If not, I've made several posts about how I created the crew/the comic, and you can read their adventure here!

This piece started as a little doodle. I wanted to create a piece for International Women's Day that included my favorite pirate crew of wackadoodle women - it obviously turned into much more. As I sketched, I started to get more excited about making a larger piece that featured all of them on their ship - the Tugboat Gloria.

Here's one of the first sketches.

After the initial doodle, I used the outlines to lay down color flats of the different parts of the ship. Then I added shadows, wood grain, detailing, cannons, colored the characters, and added some lighting effects and motion blur to the clouds. They're soaring through the air, after all!

Here's a time lapse gif of the process!

An important part of making this piece was making sure that all of the characters had their own little moments within the painting. I wanted to make sure that they stood out and were clearly silhouetted against the sky - this was a challenge with some of the characters with blue color palettes (Adeline's pants, Piper's skin). I ended up manipulating their colors a bit to make sure there was enough difference, and I added highlights to them as well.

Since this file is monstrously huge, I took some cropped pictures so you can see the characters close up!

I also cropped it to create the banner for our website! Pretty happy with how it looks, and a nice unintended result.

Thanks for checking it out and have a great weekend everyone!