From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

Custom painting in Photoshop

From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

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Custom painting in Photoshop

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- Our story is almost finished, but first and foremost, we are here to make monsters. So far, this character, is not quite gross enough. Now, I'm going to show you how to use some basic digital painting techniques and add some final details to our creature. Okay, so, the first thing we want to do is grab our layer with our character. And hit Control J. And we'll make a copy of that, and then right click off to the side and merge that group. And right click on the mask and apply that layer, apply that mask to the layer. Go ahead and hide the one underneath, and then jump over to the Dodge tool, and you want to take a look at, I think some of these areas just aren't popping enough. So the Dodge tool is going to allow us to really pop those out a little bit more so we can see them. And especially down here on the bottom of the cheek, you want to emphasize those areas. The lip, of course, is also an area we want to emphasize. And then really look over your character, and if there's any other areas, like the cloak, that need some emphasizing, don't be afraid to apply this tool to those areas. Once we have that, we can open up a new layer, and let's zoom in to this guy's face, and we need to make him a little bit grosser. So let's go ahead and add some boogers and drool, just to kind of add to the grossness of this guy. So, right here, I'm going to draw in a little bit of a medium gray, to start off with, just to get the position figured out of where I want this to be. And I will also bring in a little bit of drool around the lip. Maybe it beads up right here, and maybe we allow it to get a little stringy and put a little bead down there. So this is a good base for boogers and our drool. Let's select some black and go in and just kind of feather in some of that darker color. And then they really kind of hit the black on the top part, which might not make sense now, but once we get the specular levels on there, it will start making a little bit more sense. Just kind of shading this in, getting a few darker lines in there and create a little bit of a shadow on some of these areas. The drool might be a little intense, creates a nice shadow. And let's grab some really bright white, dial down our brush, and we'll even zoom up to where we can see the pixels. Why not? Go ahead and make a couple shiny beads of light there, and then we'll create a little bit of a bounce light, which is going to give us that realistic grossness. And we'll do the same down here. We'll add a couple spots, maybe a little streak of some shiny liquid, throw some shine down there, as well, maybe put a nice strong hot spot right here, sculpt that out a little bit more, and we'll throw in a little bit of bounce light around some of these areas as well. A little bit of bounce light kind of encapsulates the light as it's running through these liquid looking areas. And just like that, you've got some nice grossness to this character. We could also add in dark burgundy veins. We'll grab some of this purply burgandy, size down the brush a little bit, and just create some really interesting vein work on the horns. It just kind of adds a little bit more depth to it and gives it kind of a grosser vibe and feel. Now that we've digitally painted on some of the finer details, all we need are a few finishing touches, and our monster will be ready for the next big sci-fi hit movie.

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