PSDFan Extra

A Behind the Scenes Look at the Work Processes of World Renowned Artists

At PSD.FanExtra we believe that the best way to learn is from experts in your field. That’s why we employ some of the best tutorial writers and bring you regular quality content.

Tutorials are great, but I often find myself looking at work from some of the world’s top digital artists and wondering about the thought processes, techniques and workflows used to create such incredible art. I always think ‘if I only I could get my hands on their original Photoshop files I’d be able to break down exactly what makes their work so awesome!’.

Well that’s exactly what we aim to offer you guys, as part of our new series ‘Artist Breakdown’. We’re going to be talking to some of the world’s most respected digital artist’s and offering an insight into how they’ve created some of their most popular works. We’ll also provide a full .psd source file for our FanExtra members to explore. This will allow you to look through every layer, object, blending option and technique used. It’s a true behind the scenes look into some world-class work, and we hope you enjoy it!

Artist Breakdown #4. José Reis: Painting Your Fury (Source File Available)

Today we’ll be talking with José Reis about his stunning piece Painting Your Fury. You can check out more of José’s work at his blog.

1. The base photo for this image is the foundation of this intriguing work. All good photo manipulators know that the choice of photos is crucial to creating great work. How do you go about choosing the perfect images for your work?

You are right. The base for a fantastic work is the initial photo you choose to manipulate. When I did this work I really use some of the best image databases such as “istockphoto”, Shutterstock, fotolia and some more sites. We have a huge variety of photos that we can purchase with a good price and use them in our works. The search of this images are very important to achieve a fantastic result in your final piece. Fortunately nowadays I have a pleasure to work with one of the best portuguese fashion photographers named Frederico Martins and With his photos I can do work of beauty and manipulation with a very interesting style. You can view one example here.

You can view some of Frederico Martins work: www.fredericomartins.net.

2. What is the concept behind this piece, and what is represented by the leaves, lighting effects and butterflies?

The concept of this image was to give the contrast between the green colour represented by the nature and try to do something more daring, because the model’s expression conveyed anger and gave the idea of ??being a lion in the jungle. I tried to explore the wild red leaves including the butterfly, as conveyed anger and rage. The light elements were placed to give more dynamism and movement in our image with the sole purpose of captivating the reader.

3. You’ve given your piece a really dreamy feel by painting over the original photo, making it appear smoother and more stylized. How did you achieve the look and what types of painting techniques did you use?

Yes, I tried to give a dreaming feel because I love paint photos, and when we explore some painting techniques we can achieve something wonderful.

The smooth stylized is achieved through a very lengthy and very patient because it takes several hours to paint. The only tool I used to do such effect is the smudge tool. This tool can give you such a fantastic results when you want to paint something ike this. There is no secret, only smudge and a lot of patience to conclude the best result we want to explore in our image.

Source File for ‘Painting Your Fury’

FanExtra members are able to access the .psd source file for Painting Your Fury, allowing them to see the specific workflows and techniques being used to construct the piece. (If you’re not already a FanExtra member you can sign up today.)

Existing members can login here to access this source file.

About the Author:

Tom is the founder of PSDFAN. He loves writing tutorials, learning more about design and interacting with the community. On a more interesting note he can also play guitar hero drunk with his teeth.

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