Photoshop:GET EXPERIMENTAL WITH PORTRAITS

Gabriel Lee Greene shares his process for creating colourful portraits with unique graphical elements, experimenting with shapes and effects

- Gabriel Lee

As I first transitioned into working digitally, I felt overwhelmed with the amount of freedom I had. I'm sure it's something a lot of us can relate to. With an infinite amount of colour, texture and brush options at our fingertips, it's hard not to try to throw a bit of everything in the pot.

Over time, I found that with the abundance of tools came an endless amount of ways to experiment! Whether it be creating colour thumbnails, using masks/clipping modes, adding adjustment layers, or applying textural effects – the digital medium has made it simple and quick to experiment with it all.

In this tutorial, I'm going to take you through my process - how I rely on experimentation with colour, shape, various effects and adjustments to nudge me along the way. We'll touch on making colour thumbnails to create a palette, using gradient overlay to add colour harmony, and which brushes I use to help add that final bit of grain or grit to an illustration.

While I'll be using Photoshop during this workshop, these steps can be easily adopted into other programs. I'm glad to share this process and hope those who follow along are inspired to experiment!

I Start with a sketch

I started with blocking in a loose sketch. I knew going in I wanted to do two things: riff off the term 'crybaby' and keep my subject framed in a rectangle shape, but play with breaking out of the silhouette later on. In this stage I'm not worried too much about specifics - just having fun while getting the main idea out.

2 Enlarge and refine

After I feel the sketch is heading in the right direction, I'll lower the opacity, transform it to the intended size, then draw on top of a new layer set to Multiply. I'm trying to dial in the shapes and features gestured in the beginning step, while also cleaning up the line work enough to give a solid foundation.