DIY Lights to Digital Paint Strokes
For the past few months I have been imagining what I could do with a massive softbox like this one. Since then I withheld spending the hefty £100 on a cheap one and instead started thinking of a DIY version.
I already own my own collection of softboxes, but the light I was getting was never subtle and soft enough to get the desired effect.
As a result, I took my wonderful Aputure LED Al-M9 and sellotaped it to the inside of my softbox!
This stroke of genius meant that a subtle and controllable intensity of light could be diffused within the softbox and not overwhelm the natural lighting already in the scene, giving a much more natural colour in comparison to the fluorescent lights normally found in the softbox. Oh, and now the light is portable and can be taken anywhere!
The photos that we got looked great, in fact, they have the nicest lighting I have worked with.
From these shots, which I was incredibly happy with, I wanted to learn another skill! I’d been meaning on learning how to make digital paint brush strokes. With the help of this handy YouTube video, I was able to have the super easy technique in the skill box in minutes!
Paint Lettering Tutorial
With this and inspiration from the incredible Aykut Aydoğdu, I had an idea in mind to test what I had learnt.
I started by selecting the photo I wished to use for the effect.
The head was then cut from the image and a curves adjustment was used to boost areas needing contrast.
The edges then were cut away using brush textures.
After this details like shadows on the face were added before a colour change.
Finally, the mixer brush tool was used to morph the face to give a paint stroke look and drips were added with suited background to give the final product.
Using the pen tool, a ribbon looking shape was made around the head.
This ribbon is the base of the brush stroke, showing me the line that I wish it to fill.
Once I had the base mapped out, I then took to the brush tool and painted different values of the hue to create depth and shadow based on where the light in the photo was.
These brush strokes were then dragged out to look more like realistic brush strokes using the mixer brush tool.
As a result we get this:
