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It's fascinating to watch that lovely thing consuming it's surroundings. Roll on the gif.
Right then: Masks. Photoshop masks.
I found a brilliant little tutorial on the web years back, which explained them beautifully, but having just scouted around for it in vain I'm going to bite the bullet and attempt to explain them myself. You asked for it, iamus...
The gist is actually very, very simple, but notoriously difficult to get across. But here goes. Basically, you use them to manipulate areas of a layer's transparency while preserving the actual contents of the layer. Hiding (and revealing) parts of the layer, essentially, rather than erasing them.
A (hopefully) simple example might be to talk about how a mask can be used to produce ridiculously flexible shading.
Open an illustration, make a new layer at the top, and fill that layer with any colour, maybe a darkish red or blue. In the layers pallette, change the blending for the new layer from Normal to Multiply (if you want, it's not vital), and set it's opacity to 30%. You've now got a transparent colour sheen over the entire illustration.
Click the Add A Mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette (the dotted white circle on the grey background). The mask appears as a thumbnail next to your layer thumbnail, filled in white.
Now, if you press command/i (sorry, don't know the PC equivalent...), this inverts the mask and it's thumbnail becomes black. The effect this has on the actual image is that the new layer "disappears".
It's just hiding, of course.
Masks work in a greyscale spectrum. If it's mask is white, the layer is visible. If it's mask is black, the layer is hidden.
So, select a brush of your choice, set it to white and draw a few lines on your image. The areas drawn on will now reveal the contents of the layer, ie: the transparent sheen of colour. Set the brush to black, draw on these areas, and you'll hide them again.
Set your brush's opacity to anywhere between 0 and 100, and it'll produce a midtone on the mask, and thus the layer's colour sheen in that area will be semi-visible.
(NB: you're doing all this in Edit Mask mode, thus the mask icon is visible next to the layer's Eyeball. If you wanted to edit the layer itself, you'd click on it's thumbnail - the mask icon changes to a paintbrush. Click the mask thumbnail to return to Edit mask)
(Not essential, but nice to know: Alt click on the mask in the layer pallette, and the contents of the mask itself appears in the main window. Alt click on it again to return to the image.)
The real benefit of the technique is that you can now play around with the layer's colour, blending mode and opacity to subdue the shading, make it psychedelic, whatever you fancy. If you're anything like me you'll spend hours doing this. It's a fantastically "accidental" way of working, sparking off new ideas which can easily kidnap your illustrations and drag them giggling down quite unexpected routes.
There's looooads more you can do with masks, obviously, but the principle is always the same. What's visible, what's hidden and what's inbetween.
The piece you asked me to talk about was a bit of a maskfest:
The layered file bit the dust in a hard drive calamity a few weeks after it was finished, so all that's left is the lo-res website version above, and the original ink drawing:
It took weeks, if not months, of working on and off to get from b&w to colour. Acre after acre of the aforementioned mucking about with masks and blending, before finally settling on quite a simple, subtle look. But anyway, I need to re-do it for my portfolio soon and, what with knowing what the finished article is supposed to look like this time around, it's probably only a couple of days' work. I'll post images and walkthroughs of some of the more interesting stages, if that's any use.
Gosh. I'm going for a lie down. |
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