In this lesson, we were given a task to draw an elephant on photoshop. This was to trial what would be our go-to method for drawing an item.

Elephant

 

When creating a file, it is important to choose your page size, whether it be A3, A4 or something else and name your file appropriately – not too long and easily recognisable. You should set the colour mode to RGB (red, green, blue) if the image will be used digitally but select CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) if you are planning to physically print the image as the colours won’t appear properly if you use RGB.

Here I simply used the brush tool and different colours (shortcut B). You can also go to the tools bar and select the brush tool icon, however, shortcuts allow for a faster and more efficient workflow if you are constantly switching between multiple tools.

I initially used the soft round brush to outline the elephant but then I found that the edges of the lines that were drawn were faded and so colouring in the elephant looked scruffy. After this, I used the hard round brush to outline and colour in the elephant as the edges were opaque and so the finish looked clean. This is the difference between hard and soft brushes – the opacity of the edges of the lines.

With the exception of some, we realised that we hadn’t thought about using layers for separating different aspects of the elephant. For instance, the outline, the colour and several others. This made filling the shapes that I had drawn more difficult as I couldn’t get as clean as a fill as I would have had I been using layers. Using layers would’ve also enabled me to add more content to my image. For instance, a background without having to outline around the elephant that I had already drawn.

Photoshop can be used in design industries, commercial industries, film industries and many more.

 

Thanks for reading ~