German Coffee Luis Peso

8/22/2019 German Coffee Luis Peso

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Since the iPad arrived, people started to focus on it as the fingerpainting tool. It is indeed,but it is common to forget the powerful tool we always have in our pocket: the iPhone. AniPhone with Sketchbook mobile loaded is the heaven for any artist out there. Sketchbookmobile, from 3GS version, gives you a very good resolution (1024x682) and you canalways send yourself the PSD file, so there's no excuse to create on the fly.

In this tutorial I want to share with you some of my tricks and methods by painting a mugof coffee to show you how easy is to turn daily subject into art by combining your little bigcanvas with Sketchbook Mobile. So, let's start...

Starting

Since I used my iPod Touch, I realized that sketching is not (in most cases) the way togo. In most cases, we will draw at the size we are comfortable with, and often, the screensize will have control over the art we are making, and as we want to express with our art,we need to control the canvas and not opposite. I'll give you an example: try to writeonscreen "Sketchbook Mobile is the best App". Probably you only could have"Sketchbook Mobile is". Now, choose a bigger brush size and draw 6 blocks (more orless the words size) and in another layer write the right word in place...see? It fits now.So, that's my method: Blocking instead of sketching as the very first step.

In the very first steps we have to avoid the fear of ruining things out, cause there's nothingto ruin (yet :) ). So, add colors, shapes, layers...try to match composition and color themore 'accurate' possible and don't worry about details (that's the reason of our fear toruin). In these three steps I tried to match the overall color and added a new layer for themug. I used the round brush with different sizes and opacity for this rough part.


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A very useful and powerful tool is the color wheel's Hue, Saturation and Bright mode.It's really helpful to use the color picker to select a tone and only change one of thesethree values. In this case, I let Saturation intact and change the Bright value. The result is

the same hue with the same desaturation but darker for the coffee 'line' under the foam.

The Color Wheel

The ZoomI'm always zooming in and out, no matter if I'm working with the iPad or the iPhone. Tome, zooming is not a matter of resizing things but a way of stepping back. Keeping theright overall composition is a must to me, so almost every three strokes, I zoom out just tosee if what I've just done fit with the rest of the painting.

The Circle Tool

The different kind of drawing tools, such asthe circle, square and straight line, are sohelpful sometimes. If you use them too much,your painting might look soulless, but don'tthink you're cheating, people use pictures toadd elements-textures, so what's wrong witha strong & straight line? :)In the screenshot, you can see I used thecircle tool to shape the plate as this will be avery useful guide for the overal perspective,duplicated it and resized for the centered

part.

I also added the cookies and add a reddishtone to the coffee by picking the reds aroundand apply them with low opacity to controlthe flow.


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For the mug's rim I needed something more textured than a simple line to make it looklike glass. So I picked the 13th brush on the 3rd page. This brush is stunning for hair, butit worked perfect for my needs.

Once I have my rim ellipse, I delete it byparts with a small brush tip (e.g. Pencil)so now I have a guide not only for theglass shape itself but for its bright andshadow tones.Sometimes it is helpful to duplicate the

layer so you can control the intensity ofthe lines by deleting parts on theduplicated one.

The Spoon

Although my advice is to work from outside to inside, I mean, from the general to thedetail, sometimes it happens that a detail is so evident, fast and easy than before your

brain could realize you're drawing it, it'll be done. In this case it happened with the spoon.Orangish stroke, another black one and white-bluish fine line for the bright (you'll seethese extremes in metallic stuff).


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The picture in the right shows some experiments I made to find a perfect brush tip torepresent foam. I'll explain that later in this tutorial.

The Cookies

An effective painting (if you're looking for a realistic effect)consist not in making everything look perfect as a photo butin playing with the viewer's eye. You want to draw/paintthose elements (mostly little details) which the viewer willrecognize as realistic points. In this case, I'll work thecookies' grain first and then, their 'cracks'.

As you can see in the picture, I have my cookies ready witha very rough light-shadow color. If I add the little cracks now,the resulting cookies will look like a lizard (lizard's cookies?tasty! :) ) so I need to add some grain and after a few tests, I

finally find the perfect brush for it (see the images below).In the third screenshot, you can see how I played with thenoise and the jitter. This helps for randomness.

Now, the very important partis to make it believable. Justpainting with a dotted brushwill let you that: dots, so thetrick is to pick the colorgenerated 'in-between' andpaint again...and again... Untilyou'll have the desiredtexture.


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Once you're done, let's move a step further and add magic in 2 minutes (or less!) to ourtasty cookies. After a quick research, I found the brush to go

In this point, I realized that the cookies are too saturated and they don't seem to belong tothe scene. To fix this what I do is:-Pick a shadow tone in the plate (as they're on it).-Paint a bit on the cookie with the dotted brush.-Then, pick the resulting color as in the previous step and paint again (low opacity).You'll have the cookie's color perfectly mixed with plate's shadows tone...and a bit moredesaturated.

The 4th brush in the second page is perfect for the effect that I want. I needed to playwith the sliders (I mean: having fun) of the space, noise, angle and jitter. It's just amatter of trying different ways of the same brush. The rest of the values were Sized 100and Opacity 100 as well.Now, and this is important, I just touched with one shot. Otherwise the texture will resultfuzzy (kitty cookies? Hehe)

What we need to do next is:- Delete the non-desired brush stroke around the cookies.- Choose the pencil, small sized with about 16% opacity and pick in the light tone.- Follow the some parts of some strokes and you're done (see images in the next page).


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Clean the stroke. Add some light using the penciltaking the textured stroke as a path.

The Handle

The perfect way to manage a painting is treating it as a whole. What I mean is thatinstead of focusing in one element, you'll need to build everything step by step so your

piece will have cohesion (if you change the light intensity you must retouch theshadows...don't you?)I'm saying this to explain that I'll go back in time to explain the handle process (thecookies aren't finished at this point)

Painting crystal (glass) reflections is very funand enjoyable...and the final result is alwaysstunning.The way to go is to understand the shapesyou're seeing inside the glass instead of

taking them as reflections.Could you reproduce this?:

Three shapes (different to each other), threecolors... But easily recognizable. PaintingCrystal is more of a understanding work thana painter skills' task.


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I'm taking this general view so you can see what Idid at this stage.The more evident changes are the foam at thetop and the glass-look of the mug's rim.

For the rim, I just picked colors that are already in

the painting. I just used that ellipse guide to addthe color.With the foam, I just picked pastel tones totransmit how tasty it was and give it a soft look.You can see I worked a bit more on the handleand the contrast between the table and the mug.Another detail is the reflection of the cookie in themug, see what I mean? Although the mug and theplate seems unfinished and non defined, thisdetail is helping a lot.

Here you can see theprocess of the handle. It isalways amazing to me the

fact that simple strokes ofdifferent colors and sizescan work together thisgreat. Notice that I waspicking colors from aroundthe mug to add life to thehandle and transparency byseeing colors through thehandle.The light in the bottom ofthe mug gives the paintinga huge sense of light. Ipicked the colors from thelight zone in the upperzone, making just three orfour totally white dots.


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Final Steps and thoughts.

In this final stage, I added the foam texture. I used the brush in the pics above with thatparticular settings that give me the randomness I need. I just picked the color andpainted over it with the new brush, specially between light and shadow parts (where lightlets you 'see' the texture).I didn't like too much how the straight line in the background was interacting with thesubject, and I thought that, as the subject is the mug, painting the table edge wasn't aneed, so I started playing with the different colors and I do like more this way ofpresenting the mug.

Hope this tutorial was helpful, at least a bit.

Thanks for the read!

Luis Peso

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German Coffee Luis Peso