Hi there, I’m Cory with WikkidThings.com, and another great tutorial for you.
This time we’re going to focus on dark art. So, we’re going to get dark here, it’ll be fun. And focus of this tutorial is actually American Gothic Updated. So, you know the famous painting, there it is right there. So, I was talking to the model who’s involved with this project, AJ Flame, she wanted to do an American Gothic Update. But with her as, both characters, the female and the dude, is looking pretty serious there. And when we were talking about it, I was like, “Well why don’t we actually make it American Gothic, like Goth style?” So that’s the basic idea behind it. Usually a lot of this dark art tutorials they have the final product all done and they kind of show you all the steps they went through to create it. But in this case, we’re actually going to start from scratch, so I have no idea how this is going to come out in the end. So, your guess is as good as mine, but I think you’ll learn some cool stuff in the process. So, let’s just get right into it.
I actually found this picture; this is the actual house that is used in the painting. That didn’t come from the artist’s imagination, it’s an actual place and, in fact, it’s a historical monument. I wasn’t aware of that until I did a little bit of research. But, yes, so I found some good photos, this is one of the better ones, it’s a decent resolution, here it is at a 100%. It’s a decent sized photo, so it’s something that we can work with. I think I actually found this picture on Wikipedia. So, yes, go check out Wikipedia.com, look up American Gothic, and you can probably find this same picture if you want to play along.
All right, so the first thing I want to do is duplicate this background layer. Just pull that down to the duplicate key, that way we’ve got it saved down there. And I want to go ahead and hit select color range, and I’m going to choose the blues, bring up the fuzziness until you’re grabbing a lot of those blues. And hit ok. So, that grabbed a lot of stuff we want to get rid of, and some stuff that we don’t. So, I’m going to choose my lasso tool here, and click the Alt key, which is subtract from selection. And just subtract out these areas that I actually want to keep. So, whatever, just going to go and just make sure there’s no little dots blinking here. All right, I’m going to go select, actually let me go ahead and grab these clouds, go hit shift which will add to your selection, and try to get in there kind of close, and wala.
So you’re holding shift, and that will actually add to your selection, of course we’re using the lasso tool right here. And I’m still seeing a few little sections with some blinking dots here. She’s not good, so just go ahead and grab them, because we don’t want to delete any of this house. Now we are working non-destructively, so even if I accidentally go in and delete some of the house, it’s all going to be ok, I promise, because what we’re going to do is work with layer masks. Layer mask basically hides and shows whatever you want to hide and show. And I’ll show you what I mean. Hit select, inverse, and go down to your layer mask, which is this button right here. And it’s going to add a layer mask, and wala, it just knocked out that background, but it’s still there, it’s just being hidden by the layer masks. So, if you accidentally chopped off some of your house, no biggy. Everything’s still compositic. So, when I switch back and forth I see a couple of other places where some stuff got knocked out right here. So just like that, I just fixed it, I just repaired the house, and it’s looking awesome. Kind of just pulling some of these edges that we lost, and that’s looking pretty good.
Now I want to get in a little bit closer. We’ll use some of these trees because we’re going for Gothic theme, we’re going for something a little bit more scarier than this. These are looking a little bit too healthy. So, let’s just go in and erase these. Again, I’m not using an erase tool; I’m using my brush on my layer mask. And with it set to black, it’s just hiding these. So, they’re still there. No worries. And a lot of these details are actually not going to show up in the final picture. So, it’s not that important and it’s perfect right now. Bring your brush size down. And set it for a hardness of 100. Bring that brush size down a little bit. So, I guess that doesn’t need to be perfect right now. Just get the basic idea, and we can go in and get closer if we need to later. So, just kind of get rid of some more of this. So, you see that’s pretty cool. Like I said all this stuff is still here, if you hit shift, and hit the layer mask, it’ll show you the original layer. Anytime you fuck up, just hit control Z, that undoes the last thing that you did.
Now this is pretty straight up and down, I’m just going to go edit, fill with black, boom; gets rid of some of that. And you can always use your quick selection tool. So, let’s just go ahead and switch back to your layer mask, edit, fill with black, and wala. All right, I’m going to go ahead and throw in a sky background. So, got a few different cool selections here, by the way, a good place to get stock photos is iStockphoto.com. They have some of the best photos you can think of. Of course the most important part when you’re designing is that you have some good music, so I don’t know about this right now. This is getting a little bit too gay, so let me find something even more gay. There you go, that’s a little more gay, that’s better. All right, so, shrink this up. Hell yes.
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