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JHRF 2017 side by side steps

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This work was done for a Heavy-Rock music festival poster (Juárez Heavy Rock Fest) 

Si tu idioma es el español, no sabes mucho de ingles y queres saber algo de lo q escribí, podes preguntar en español :thumbsup:

I was a bit in a hurry to finish this piece but anyway I wanted to try/learn a couple new ways of coloring with this piece so because of that I'm uploading this step by step image to share some words of what I did. 

:bulletgreen:1 - Nothing much to say about the first step, I always do pencils on traditional media, the only difference now is that usualy the next step for me would be traditional inking so the pencils are usually done with that in mind but that wasn't the case this time.

:bulletgreen:2 - Here starts the new things I wanted to try instead of doing tradional (or even digital) inking. Now I start to work on PS. What I did in this step was doing grayscale shading. Usually I work the lights and shadows (even if this starts on the pencils stage) directly with colors but I found this way of working with grayscale really useful to have a better idea of how the different elements interact with eachother and even faster than working with colors.
And as a side benefict...(thinking loud now)... it's not my case so I can't be sure how effective this could be but I guess if you don't have a powerful computer and you need to work on a large piece at high dpi (450/600) this could help because you could be doing a big part of the work working on grayscale mode on a single layer which should be less resouces consuming...just guessing. 

:bulletgreen:3 - This step is also something new for me, here what I did was start working with layer masks. This masks can be used for many purposes in many different ways but what I would "explain" now is in the coloring context so it's just one way on using it.
If you never used the layer mask option you will find it on the bottom of the Layers tab between the mask style icon (fx) and the layer adjusment icon. First you've to create a new layer (as you always do) and then hit the layer mask icon, when you do that you will see two thumbnails with a link between them, the thumbnail on the left would be used to fill with a color (solid color on my case). When you do this you will see that the whole image will be covered by that color so next thing you should do is select the thumbnail at the right and fill it will black (your color selector will change now to black and white). So when you fill it with solid black you will be "hiding" the color of the first thumbnail. Now you can start to use your brush (always with the sencond thumbnail selected) using white and and you will start to unhide the color. This method is really usefull because you could revisit this layer at any time and you don't need to save the color you was using because you always will be "painting" with white or black to "erase", and you can change the color on the first thumbnail at any time without having to deal with less accurated tools such as the hue adjustment slide. And of course like with any regular layer you can play with the blending mode and opacity.
So what I did to get the image you see on this step was create a regular layer for the background using the gradient tool. And I used 3 or 4 layers with masks to paint with bruses and another layer on top with solid color to cover the whole image and I changed the blending mode and opacity to create a color effect. 

:bulletgreen:4 - On this step The only thing I did was working on the sky for the background, nothing much to say just 2 layers using clouds brushes and one more on top of those two using again the gradient tool for darkening the upper part of the sky. 

:bulletgreen:5 - the final step here (I did some small touches after this) was create a layer for flats colors (main grayscale shading layer was set on multiply blending mode). Again not much to say I just used the base colors I considered the best for each object always with solid brush/pencil tool or lasso tool . 
The final touches I did after that was actually changea bit the colors for some of the mask layers. 

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The use of the layer mask was thanks to a great artist Tamra Bonvillain that showed me part of her way of coloring comics. So Thanks a lot for that Tamra :) it's a really interesting and useful way of coloring.
If you don't know her work I would suggest you to look for it, in my own opinion I think her coloring work always put the final art on a really high quality level no matter how good the linework was and I think that's something really hard to achieve.
And the idea of working the grayscale shading before the color stage I think I can say it comes from an artist from my country (Argentina) that I always admired Ariel Olivetti. For what I have saw he works on a pretty different way after doing the grayscale shading, I think I will try something of that on future pieces. 

That's all, sorry for the long text and the grammar mistakes it sure have since english is not my native language. 

Feel free to ask if you want to know something else and I will try to give you an answer or better explanation. 
Image size
3205x900px 1.21 MB
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