I am back. I am married and life is great. I have been away for a bit, however I am hoping to get back into things figured this was a good step. I have done my best with this with the current time I have, so if you want more let me know, I can expand upon this to provide a more in depth look as well.

Well I figured this was the best way to get my self prepared for the tutorial writing. Start with a breakdown of a work I have completed. Forgive me if there are any annoying gaps, and if there is anything you feel I should have covered please let me know.

Step 1: Where do I start?

I usually start sketching on paper or maybe even a photoshop doodle, this was a bit of an exception seeing as I had clear cut vision of that iTunes commercial with break dancers. So I opened PS and went to work.

I set my canvas at 1680 x 1050 , I was just planning to make this for me so I made no provisions for larger screens. Then I filled it black.

Step 2: Lighting.

The radial gradient tool is your friend here. I selected some slick colors and went to town with the end of the gradient being completely transparent. The colors I used are:

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I drew some gradients that looked a bit like this.

Next I blur that result by 100 pixels with the gaussian blur, then I make a marquee selection of about the area I would like the floor to be and then erase it 70%. Your result should be similar to below.

Then drop this layers opacity to 15%. We area going to apply a layer style to this layer here are the settings I used.

The colors were a little too much for me so I made some adjustments with brightness and contrast.

Now you should have something similar to this.

Next were going back to the radial gradient tool. Here are the colors I used then I smuged them like so.
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I then set the layers blend mode to color and opacity to 15%, the result was this.

The next layer was filled with this gradient.

Then I changed blend mode to color and opacity to 30%.

The background layers are done throw em in a group and lets move on to better things.

Step 3: Subject Matter

I used a photo of a break dancer you can use whatever you like. I took the photo and carefully pulled it from the background. I usually do this with three passes, first a extraction with the pen tool, then a eraser pass with a bright contrasting color layer underneath to show me all the details i am keeping, followed by focusing on the hair. I then desaturated the photo and took a large soft brush and painted in shadows except for subtle hints of light to help define the subject. Like so…

Step 4: Dancing lights…

Things will get a little quick from here. I made this some time ago and it is hard to remember the exact steps. I added a layer behind the dancer.  A white radial gradient and smudged it to look like a huge burst of light.

Great this is adding some depth, so lets get crazy. I created another layer like the layer from step two that built the second layer of lights. I used a similar blue and a more red color as well as a light purple and subtle orange. It was blurred and transformed to look like this.

Lets combine this with before.

Next I just started experimenting with different lighting ideas, sorry this inst more in depth. I just started adding more little gradients around the dancer coming from behind him and even some motion blurred 2 or three pixel paths and linear gradients.

Next I added some smokey effcts using some smoke brushes from here. I layerd them up and erased areas I did not need untill I had this.

Filed under: Art, Code, Inspiration, tutorials by Dan