Here is a very quick and easy technique to add some depth to drawings in Photoshop. See the pictures at the bottom.
To start with, make a line drawing of the subject. Here I have drawn the Pokrovski cathedral on the Red Square (also known as st. Basil's).
Create a second layer and apply the base colors on it. Don't worry about shadows or highlights yet, just use the basic color.
Then create two adjustment layers on top of the base color. Choose levels and check the option to use the previous layer as a clipping mask. On the first adjustment layer, called shadows, drag the right slider to 127 to create a darkened image. For the second layer, called highlights, drag the left one up to 127, creating a lightened image. The third picture below shows what the layers palette will look like.
We will be drawing on the mask of the layers, so select the mask first and fill it with black. Now the effects are applied nowhere. To apply shadows and highlights draw with white on the mask to reveal. When the shadows are too hard, you can blend them by applying a gaussian blur to the mask. The nice thing about using adjustment layers is that you can still tweak the effect of the shadows and highlights by changing the levels.
Adding a black background and some snow, we get the finished picture on the left. By the way, the snow is made by setting an irregular brush with size and color jitter (just a bit) and painting with white.
- Art
