ANDREW JONES
CANSON RENDERING IN PHOTOSHOP

Here Andrew's tutorial really starts to come alive through very effective use of lighting and shading.  Andrew also goes on to show how to use a very subtle reflection in the ground to give a little more impact to the render.  This is a simple, yet highly effective technique.  The final result is a highly emotive yet very descriptive piece of artwork that will help sell an idea to your fellow designers and bosses alike. When trying this technique yourself, it may be interesting to see the varying emotions you can get by using a different background colour.

 

Now the main blocking in is finished we can create another MULTIPLY layer for extra shading, mainly on the car body side.

Firstly select the whole body side from the nose to where the rear wishbone is. You can now using a large light grey airbrush intensify and darken the whole area to pull it out from the back ground. You can then select the rising sill and darken that further to create a surface break. Fill in the areas inside the wheels etc.

Its important to maintain a focal point – so I have made the car darker towards to front left hand corner and lighter (faded) towards the rear and parts of the car that are furthest away.

Remember your light layer should still be above this layer.

For the ground reflection – quickly select and copy the side of the car including the wheels. Then flip the layer vertically. Now distort that image until it roughly looks about right. You may need to cut & move bits around, especially the wheel reflections.
If you lower the layer opacity to around 10% then erase a few areas with an airbrush to keep it purely as a suggestion – rather than anything accurately rendered.

I have also added some white highlight steaks using a fine airbrush and paths (see stage 1)

Add other details like rear light and headrest suggestion and some subtle reflections.

If you duplicate your original clean line art layer from stage 1 and bring that layer all the way to the top. You can then invert the layer or bring its brightness up to the max to get white lines.

You don’t have to do this, but white lines have more drama on a Canson style render. You can then erase some back in darker areas etc.

The reason for doing this is to both enhance the sketch feel and define surface breaks with a highlight rather than a black line.

I have also added centre highlights and a front glowing light

For the finishing touches copy merge the whole image and paste the layer at the top (or flatten the whole image)

To give it more impact you can then turn up the contrast to around +6. Feel free to experiment with different amounts – but too much will look harsh.

Also you can create a colour layer which basically allows you to tint the colours of the image below, without losing detail/ contrast. I used a blue airbrush just over the top surfaces of the car to add a bit more interest.

Now the render is finished, although you can play with hue/ saturation levels if you want different colour scheme.