Photoshop Grain Illustration

Resources

• Inspiration:

Situation

I’ve never been great at digital illustration, especially with shading and lighting. After seeing the video above, I wanted to practice a workflow that uses Photoshop’s grain brushes to build soft, textured shadows and highlights over a vector base.

Task

Experiment by creating a portrait illustration of my brother using a workflow that begins with a pencil sketch, builds vector shapes to block in color, and layers grain shading to add volume and lighting.

Action

• Started with a pencil sketch on paper, which I scanned and imported into Photoshop.
• Created vector shape layers for each individual color area (skin, hair, eyes, clothing, background).
• Used various blend modes, adjusted opacities, and applied dark and light colors to build up soft shadows and bright highlights.

Result