Free Photoshop Tutorial - Making the Mothership!
Adobe Photoshop Tutorial Overview
This Adobe Photoshop Tutorial shows you how to create your own sci-fi mothership breaking through the clouds, ready for invasion! The techniques covered in this tutorial are not the standard techniques you will see in many photo editing tutorials because we are airbrushing in a major component of the image from scratch.
A Word About the Wacom Stylus vs Mouse for Painting in Adobe Photoshop
While a stylus isn't necessary for this tutorial I would highly recommend it for the detailed shading. It won't make you draw any better but you will find it cuts the shading time by 2/3rds. If you don't have a stylus though, don't let that detour you from using your trusty mouse. You can get the same effects from your mouse by using varied pen sizes and a low flow opacity.
Step 1 - Sci-Fi Starship Design 101
First you need a decent backdrop photograph filled with a lot of clouds. Our mothership is going to be designed entirely from scratch so get ready to design and draw, Photoshop style! Create a new layer and call it mothership base. This will be our starting point for the drawing so take the ellipse tool and draw an oval giving the proper perspective based on your cloud layer, in this case we are going for a fairly dark looking ship so pick an "almost" black color, say (40, 40, 40) RGB. We're using a slightly lighter shade of black because pure black almost never exists naturally. Create a new layer on top and call it sketch, we will use this as a scratch layer to give us a guide to go off of. Since our mothership is black you will want to chose a white color for your sketching. Start sketching a basic outline of the flowing contours of the ship. Refer to the example image on the right for guidance. Use a low flow small brush for the sketching. Even with a stylus it can be difficult at first but you just want a rough sketch to give you a guide as we progress.
Step 2 - Blocking in Color for Basic Shading
We need to start blocking in some color to give the ship a 3 dimensional effect. A good way to keep your color palette sorted is to create a top layer which you can quickly use to select the shades from. Just paint in a blotch on that layer whenever you select a new color. Duplicate the mothership base layer and call it mothership shade. Hide the base layer but keep it around, it comes in handy if you make a mistake and need to start over. Lock transparent pixels on this layer to keep us from painting out of the lines. Pick a lighter shade of gray (125, 125, 125) and begin painting the outer edges of the disc shape using the sketch as a guide, don't worry about getting it exact as we will be blending this later. What we're doing here is blocking the paint into the general shaded areas to give us a base to work from. We're left with something similar to the image on the right. Now it's time to blend the base shading together so add some gaussian blur [Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian], drag the amount until you get a smooth blend between the blocked shades.
Step 3 - Airbrushing in Some Sci-Fi Details
Right now you should be able to see a bit of 3D quality to our image but it's not quite realistic yet. Let's add some detail with Photoshop airbrushing. Select a dark shade, maybe even pure black for this and begin painting in some detail over our shaded layer using a small round brush with a low flow setting. Do the same for the highlights. This is really the area where a stylus can come in handy but if you're patient you can accomplish this with your trusty mouse. Continue painting in detail until you're happy with the results. Remember you can always paint over mistakes so be bold.
Step 4 - Adding Flaming Laser Beams
Create a new layer and name it flames. Let's find a good brush in Photoshop for this, select "thick heavy brushes" from the brush selections and choose "smoother round bristle", adjust the size based on what you need for the image. We're making blue flames here so pick out a nice shade of blue and start brushing the main area of our laser beam. Remember to use a lot of strokes at a very low flow setting. Since our beam is quite bright you can get away with using some pure white for the highlights. Use small strokes to paint in detail until you get the results that you want.
Step 5 - Detail Work and Finishing Touches
Our laser wouldn't be much fun without some destruction so lets add a dust layer and start painting in some debris. Two shades of brown should do the trick here. Create a new layer between the mothership and laser beam and call it clouds. This is where we begin to add some realism to this photo / art hybrid. You want to sample some shades of gray from the clouds in the photo and start painting in some areas where the ship is breaking through the clouds. The bristle brush we used earlier is perfect for this part. Continue adding highlight and shadow until it blends well with your background clouds. Finally we want to add some shadow to really put the ship into the scene so duplicate that original ellipse we made earlier and put it on a layer just above the background picture. Go to [Edit -> Transform -> Distort and drag it around until it matches the ground plane. Then add some gaussian blur and reduce the opacity. There you have it, you're own Independence Day style mothership created entirely in Adobe Photoshop!