Watch as I draw a Bird Skull… Using Photoshop CS5.5 and a Wacom Tablet, I attempt to get a realistic bone texture. I am using Photoshop standard hard round and soft round brushes. My colour choices were an off white and a warm (reddish) gray colour. I started by loosely defining the overall outline of the skull.

Next, I moved on to blocking in the major masses. After that I concentrated on making the 'form read' by using different tonal values to indicate where the light is hitting and not hitting the surface of the object. Planes that are angled towards the light will be lighter in value and planes that are angled more away from the light will be darker in value. Makes sense, right? As light can only hit a surface which is facing it!

The rest of the painting process was just back and forth between adding lighter and darker values to denote the form change. The color was added without too much fore-thought. A mistake on my part. As this would look a lot better had I given the correct considerations to the color of the main light source, the colour of its surroundings and the natural colour of the bone material itself. Lesson learned!

Any ways, I hope you enjoyed the video. Let me know by giving it a like on YouTube, and subscribing if you have not already done so.

In the meantime, Happy painting.