Making Of "But Not Broken By Kirsi Salonen     ;  Part 2

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Here I'm in a phase that I'm, satisfied with the landscape so I flatten the image for clarity and it's simpler to manage.

The main thing in this step is to separate the colour tones between the character and background. This happens best with Selective colour adj. layer. I brings out the warm tones of the face and make it colder in the back.
Then I add small highlights and details (such as the red artificial eye) and add more contrast differences here and there. It's also important to add highlighted edges to the character, so he won't look flat against the landscape.

More details and mood. With Freehand vector pen again I scribbled some extra buildings to the back. Then I wanted to have this apocalyptic, but still kind of serene view, so the middleway to achieve this was to create some smoking traces of destruction. So, again some lassoing areas I want to have smoke and then adjust the levels with its own mask layer. With a customed double brush it's fun and easy to add more or less smoke as you can see from the brush palette.

After this is done, I add a couple of normal gradient-filled layers to soften up the colour harmonies. These layers are adjusted to warm tones and are in a Hard Light mode to give some warmth and depth to the image.


The things you do for the last are the things that really make the work. In my philosophy no work is good enough if you feel uneasy after finishing it. You have to LOVE all your works but still know how to evaluate them as 'cold' as you can. Tough combo, but very necessary to the artist.

After the phase 7 I flipped the image horizontally if there's any last corrections needed to be made. That flip showed that his forehead and nose need some fixing. So I added a new separate layer and put some flesh-toned gradient to the editable places and blended it all in. Then I took the Dodge-tool and with a light texture on it and added highlights to the cheakbone, jaw and forehead. Also added some transparency to the metallic parts with very faint greyish gradients, since I don't want it to get too black and dark in the face.

Last touch ups are the small texture highlights where the strong light hits and which parts draw your attention first. So without too much unnessessary effort, I pick a couple standard textures to the Dodge-tool (Strings, Optical Checkerboard) and those can give the interesting feel that his skin is not all organic, but even could be digital. Then add some high contrasty luminance showing from the back of his head to create bit of feel of rim light. But since there's not direct sunlight visible and the atmo is kind of semi-cloudy and misty, I don't want to make the difference too sharp from the edges.

After this I just watch the piece a while, go to other room, then to a long run, then come back to see if it still looks alright. Now I add some minor shifts to colour balances and make sure all's good and wrap it up.

That's about it. There may be some things I didn't mention since I work quite fast and don't 'register' everything I do while working. Estimately this piece took 9 h to complete, it had about 15 layers at max and the psd's resolution was 200px/cm, with dimensions of 3636 x 1500 px.

Hope you enjoyed reading the tutorial and it managed to give you lots of inspirational kicks!

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