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Photoshop Tips
Creating a Financial Planning Ad Illustration in Photoshop
Dateline: November 28, 2005
Version: Photoshop CS
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Mick Coulas didn’t struggle to find the right balance of humor and realism in his illustration for a financial planning ad. Using digital photos taken with a wide angle lens of kids wildly
fighting over a teddy bear, Coulas referenced their faces for the exaggerated
expressions of his hyperrealistic illustration.
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“I prefer to use as many reference photos as possible,” Coulas says. “A lot of times, all
those expressions are almost impossible to get in just a few photos so
I’ll need to pull out and mix-and-match facial features and expressions
that don’t naturally occur.” Once he decided which features to combine
and work over, he isolated each element with the Lasso tool and
feathered them at a 1-pixel Radius by pressing Option/Alt-Command/
Ctrl-D to access the Feather dialog box. He then copied and pasted
each selection into layers of a new document. After Coulas had all the
features for each head sized and in place, he linked the layers and used
Free Transform to slightly shape, angle, and amplify certain areas, such
as the girl’s eyes, nose, and the top of her head.
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 When painting over images, Coulas usually uses a
soft, round airbrush with tapered ends because it most
closely mimics the effect of traditional airbrushing. He
began painting with colors sampled by option-clicking
with the Eyedropper tool on the photos, using the left
and right bracket keys to adjust the size of his brush, and
by pressing Shift-Left/Right Bracket to adjust the Hardness
in 25% increments. He kept the paint within target
areas by pressing Forward Slash to lock the layer’s
transparency. “I’m a huge advocate of using keyboard
shortcuts. Anytime my attention is taken away from the
image, whether that’s to go to the menu options or to a
palette, I spend more time setting up my brush than
painting,” he observes.
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To achieve more accurate skin tones,
Coulas used a stipple brush at a large Diameter
for a more uneven appearance. Using a
white clown wig for the girl’s hair, he worked
into the image with an auburn colored airbrush
while pressing Shift- –/+ to toggle
through brush modes—applying Normal as
opaque paint, Multiply as semitransparent
paint, and Screen as subtractive paint (used
for the highlights here). Pressing the number
keys to adjust Opacity and the Shift-number
keys to control Flow, Coulas added volume
and dimension to the hair.
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The overhead angle and smaller background
details also helped to build a dramatic sense of
perspective. Using additional reference photos
for the bed and bedding, he broke up and seamed
together some of the images, then painted
over them with the Airbrush tool. “It also helps
to kind of smash the details of the images by
using the Median and Blur filters to reduce the
photographic quality of it,” Coulas notes. If he
ever loses too much detail, Coulas will go back
over the areas where the filter was applied
with the history brush to resurrect some of the
original textures.
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The final illustration is shown at left (click to enlarge).
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