PROCESS VIDEO // breeze - part 3

This is Part 3 of my full process for Breeze, a painting I made in 2022! Check out the feed to see Part 1 and 2.

Here’s some information about this process video: 

• It has been sped up by 250%, so 2.5 times the original speed. 

• This painting session took me about  6 and a half hours, split up into multiple sessions.

• I split the full process into three parts. This is part two of three!

• I mostly used the hard round brush from my own brush set to paint this, as well as the lasso tool & gradient combination. To learn more about that, check out my step-by-step resource on painting with the lasso tool. 

• This is painted in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to replicate a similar workflow in Procreate, use a soft/blendy brush instead of the gradient. There’s more about how to do that in my tutorial video on creating soft and hard edges with the lasso tool!

Here are some helpful resources that can help understand this process in more detail: 

• Painting clouds: This video talks you through how I paint clouds, and especially how important is is to vary the shapes that you’re using to create more visual appeal.

• Creating interesting & flowy shapes: This tutorial talks about how you can approach shapes in a way that is expressive and dynamic. Shape language plays a huge role in this study, so this tutorial can give some insight into the ideas behind them!

• Soft & hard edges with the lasso tool: This is a technique I use a lot for this process, and this tutorial runs you through it and also provides a short demo for how you can mimic the same effect in Procreate.

THE POWER OF BLUR

One of the reasons why I love working digitally is because it’s so easy to add special effects, like motion blur. I use a lot of that in this painting, because I want to get that sense of a breeze going through the image, and of movement in the figures. In general, I feel like a motion blur is more powerful than a normal (gaussian) blur because it creates a sense of movement, even when used in a subtle way. You can apply motion blur to an entire layer, or you can select some specific areas and only blur that - something I did to the top of the cloud. For the figures, I blurred them and painted over that blurred layer again to bring back some definition. I think if you can use these types of digital effects in a controlled and intentional way, they are incredibly powerful! 

CRISP DETAIL VS LARGE SHAPES 

I think one of the best ways to bring a painting to life is by adding crisp, sharp details at the very end. They create such a nice balance with the larger shapes and areas of solid color, like the blue sky in the background. In the final stages, you have a much clearer idea of the overall level of detail in the painting, so you know exactly where you can boost it in order to push it to that final level. In the final stages of this painting, I push the complexity of the highlights on the left side of the grey cloud (46:19 minutes in), and also add some texture to the reflective ground with an overlay image (30:00 minutes in) from a photo that I took myself. This just adds that final level of crispness! 

PROCESS REEL 

I also filmed some very short clips of my process and uploaded it to Instagram Reels. Even though it’s very short compared to these videos, it might give some insight into how I use the lasso tool to build detail! Sometimes seeing my hand actually make the movements can be clarifying. Check it out here! 

I hope you enjoyed this process, and remember that you can always request a process video that I haven’t shared before! Most of the time I still have the recordings lying around somewhere - so don’t hesitate to ask :) And if you have any questions, be sure to let me know!