Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Painting in Photoshop CS3 for Technical Illustrators

Illustration Stats - Size: 36" @ 350 dpi, 640 mb CMYK File with 35 Layers / Illustration Time: 720 hrs.

Software: Line Art - Adobe Illustrator CS CS2 CS3, Color - Adobe Photoshop CS CS2 CS3

Hardware: Apple Power Mac G5, Drawing Tablet: Wacom

With all of the line art complete, it was time to move on to the color phase. The line art was exported from Adobe Illustrator CS into Adobe Photoshop CS. At this point in the project, photo reference started to come in.

The first step was to duplicate all of the floor coverings in "plan" view using repetitive patterns in Illustrator Vector. The following image is the tile floor of the ship's Solarium. All of the hard floor surfaces and most of the carpeting was created in Illustrator vector - then converted to Photoshop.

These Adobe Illustrator vector files were distorted into the correct perspective of the main illustration using Illustrator's "Free Transform" tool, then they were exported into Adobe Photoshop.

The carpet patterns were created in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop working from client supplied carpet samples. Carpet texture was created with the Photoshop CS "Noise" and "Blur" filters.

The carpet patterns were scaled to a "plan view" template and laid out in their correct positions. Then the entire deck flooring was distorted into perspective using Adobe Photoshop's "Free Transform" tool.

Plan view of deck 6 with all of the carpet patterns located into the template in their correct positions (below, top). Final perspective view of deck 6.

The final painting phase resulted in a Photoshop file with 29 paint layers and 6 line layers with a file size of 988 mb. This was merged down to a more manageable 14 layers for delivery to the client. For more information on mechanical and technical drawing techniques, please visit the Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator Tutorials section".

This is a close-up detail of the atrium area at 100 percent of the final artwork's native resolution. As stated in the previous lesson, at this scale, the "physical" size of the illustration would be 12 feet.

Many people will ask: why not use a CAD program to create an illustration such as this? Although CAD is a powerful tool to create and render 3 dimensional objects, it has inherent limitations that would make it impractical to use on an illustration of this scale and complexity.