Digital illustrator Anton Nelson shows you how to use advanced painting techniques in Photoshop to create poster art with impact.
This tutorial aims to show how an illustration made up of various elements is created and prepared for print in a magazine. The work was created in Photoshop CS3 but it could be done in any version of the program from CS1 upward.
To begin, open a new document in Photoshop and go for a horizontal A4 page at 300dpi. This resolution is used for high-quality magazine printing and will keep the illustration crisp and clear. Start an image in RGB and convert it to CMYK later, as CMYK in Photoshop can sometimes cause strange distortions when tweaking colours.
Next, break up the white space, using the Brush tool in the Brushes toolbar. Choose a textured brush with a 50 per cent Opacity/50 per cent Flow in a mid-grey colour. Work the grey into the corners of the canvas and use the Line tool to create vertical lines building up a rough textured background, working over the grey with white again to get an even background that won’t draw the eye away from the rest of the picture.