Fantansy Worlds: Part 1
Generating the Idea
Creating a fantasy world in Photoshop couldn’t be easier if you have a few tricks up your sleeve, and lots of resources to work from.
This 3 part tutorial will show you how to create a world like the one featured here. The techniques described are detailed, and are great ways to manage and manipulate all of your assets. In the end, you will have an adjustable Photoshop Document that allows for multiple edits, additions and potential enhancements with other software programs like AfterEffects or even the all mighty Flash!
Creating fantasy worlds is likely one of the most enjoyable activities for a creative professional, and after completing this tutorial series, you will have all the tools necessary to explore and expose your deep and hidden psychological ghosts.
Getting Started
Before embarking on such a monumental task, the first step is to visualize how your world will look. This will almost always turn out to be a very different animal than the one in your mind, but it is important to have a basis with which to start.
In all honesty, I had hand drawn 4 or 5 characters in my sketch book that had no real place to go, so I thought they might look fun combined together in their own land. Kind of a place for forgotten rogues. So this is essentially where I started… I also created an interesting effect with a sky in one of my photographs by playing with the color negative curves setting. It’s funny, but sometimes you do or discover things that at once don’t seem usable. In this case, I had some resources and techniques that might never have seen the light of day if I didn’t twist my thoughts enough to see how the could come together.
Ok, so you have your borderline trip to the funny farm idea. Now is the time to get dirty.
First, of course, you need to scan in your sketches. We will be creating brush presets out of our creatures, so a semi-detailed scan in black and white will be sufficient. On this particular project my sketches have little shading, and are really only outlines of an idea. All of the shading, coloring and refinement will be done in Photoshop.
So after you get your scans into your computer, open them in Photoshop. You will need to create a new preset for each character. Well… you don’t need to, but think of them as building blocks. The more separated the elements are, the easier they will be to manipulate. In fact, because they are going to end up being brushes, your objects will be highly malleable.
Preparing your Image for conversion
So the first thing to understand about creating new brush presets, is that only areas of black and gray are recorded in the brush, and all areas of white become transparent. (Brush presets are only interested in gray-scale images) Also, the preset is essentially a bitmap, meaning that the recorded pixels will have an optimum size called the “Sample Size”. You will still be able to manipulate the brush as you want, but if you do this too drastically, the resulting brush stroke will have a loss in quality. So you need to prepare your source with care.
Because I like to cover my basis… I made sure each of my creatures were at a size suitable for print. The creatures aren’t meant to be huge, but each is approximately 800 pixels to start. I also paid particular attention to the dirt in the source. The scan will pick up unintended shadows, flecks, imperfections, etc. etc. You will want to clean up all undesirable marks in the source file before creating a brush out of the scan, as all areas of gray will be reproduced in the preset. You can erase them, use the stamp tool, the healing brush or whatever method tickles your fancy. As a final touch up, you should apply a pretty strong s-curve with the curves dialogue box to blow out the highlights and deepen the ink. This will also have the effect of making strong imperfections more apparent so you can remove them.
Recording your Preset
Now that the file is ready, we can actually make our brush preset, and you will soon see the amazing power of this method. Once you are satisfied with your source file, and it is cropped to contain only the information you wish to record in the brush, go to the menu and choose… Edit -> Define Brush Preset… As a best practice, you should certainly give your brush a suitable name… mine I will name “Grin Head”. Do not pay too much attention to the tiny preview displayed in this box. It is not accurate. It is an attempt to crush all of your pixel information into approximately a 55 X 55 pixel box.
You can always go back afterwards to rename your brush in the options bar. To do this, you must have the brush tool selected, and access the brush drop down menu. You can then right click (option click, mac) on your particular brush and choose “Rename Brush” to access the original dialogue box again.
Saving your Presets
Alright, so now repeat this process for all of your creature creations. After doing this 5 or 6 or 35 times, you are going to want to save your presets into a separate file so the information is portable and safe. The best way to do this is to open your “Preset manager”. Go to the main menu bar, and choose Edit -> Preset Manager and a new dialogue box will appear. The idea here is to create a set of like minded brushes. There is drop down menu, near the top, so ensure “Brushes” is selected. At this point all of your newly created brushes should be visible as previews, along with a likely number of default brushes and other unwanted riff-raff. Select only the brushes you want to save as a set, (Shift click and Alt Click work in this selection process) and Click the “Save Set” button on the right of the box.
** Important Saving Tip
By default Photoshop will open to a preselected system folder that has a location something like “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Brushes”. This location is used by the program to load in brush sets when it initiates. As a best practice, I do not suggest saving your created presets into this file. The actual file structure you use is really up to you, but I like to keep my personal brushes separate on my system, for organization, ease of searching and portability. It is still possible to have your brushes initiate with the program by placing a shortcut to your folder in the above mentioned Photoshop location.
Photoshop uses the “.abr” extension (Adobe Brushes) for this file. Organization is key. You will want to come up with your own name identification scheme. It is something that should make sense to you. Over the lifetime of your graphic creation career or hobby, you will be creating a large number of brush presets (because they are just so damn cool), so make sure the name you save the file under is not just whatever pops into your head. You will want to be able to identify your set easily amongst an list of 40, 50 or 500 sets. So be careful. You can use nested folders to organize your files, but you are still going to want to identify your file without having to open it and look at the content. My file will located on my D drive at “D:\\Adobe Presets\Photoshop\Brushes\creatures\fantasyWorldProject.abr”.
Logically, I like to create creatures, so I will have lots of different sets of them. This project is memorable for me, and I call it fantasyWorld, so this word will trigger my memory 3 years down the road when I am looking at this file and wondering what heck is inside.
Moving Forward
It is not my intention to go too deeply into the power of brushes with this tutorial, but if you have a general idea on how to use brushes and the “brushes” dialogue box, you will already know the advantage of starting out with this method. Practices like the one I describe above allow for maximum scalability, and creative experimentation. It is a work flow process that should be repeated time and time again so that when it becomes second nature, you are devoting less mental power on process, and more on creation.
In the next tutorial I will go more into transforming and integrating our brush preset creatures and color negative sky into a more worldly scene with manageable and editable layers. There’s still lots to do, and even more to learn, so check back frequently, it won’t be long before part two is posted.