Village at Night
I paint quite a few portraits, and decided to try my hand at a village scene. I used the Vector tool in SketchClub to create a nighttime scene in a naive style such as you might see in a children’s book. I used iColorama to make it look magical.
I opened a blank canvas in SketchClub. I used a pen to sketch my idea. I will use the sketch as a guide, but will turn off visibility for it later.
On a new layer under the sketch layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for a building and its roof.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for windows on the building.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for two more buildings, with their roofs and windows.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for another building with its roof and windows.
On a new layer below the other layers, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for another building with its roof and windows.
On a new layer below the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for another building with its roof and windows.
On a new layer below the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for another building with its roof.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for windows for the building.
On a new layer below the other layers, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for a building with its roof.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for windows for the building.
On a new layer above some of the building layers and below the rest of the building layers, I used the Vector tool to create a shape for a stream running through the village.
On a new layer below all the other layers, I used Color Fill to fill the layer with a dark purple color for the night sky.
On a new layer above the purple layer, I used the Vector tool to create a shape for a small hill that the village is situated on.
I turned off visibility for the sketch layer.
On a new layer above the windows layer for one of the buildings, I used a soft round brush to paint a yellow light shining through the windows. I changed the layer blending mode to On, which has the effect of applying the painted light only to the windows on the layer directly below. This was possible only because I had thought to put the windows on their own layer, and not painted directly onto the building layer.
I did the same thing for two of the other buildings, which were the ones where I had thought to put the windows on their own layer.
On a new layer above the stream layer, I used the Vector tool to create shapes for small waves in the stream.
On a new layer below most of the buildings but above some of them, I used a soft round brush to paint a lighter shade of purple to represent a glow coming from behind most of the buildings.
On a new layer below some of the buildings but above most of them, I used a soft round brush to paint the same light shade of purple to represent a kind of glowing fog drifting among the buildings.
On a new layer above the purple background layer, I used the Vector tool to create a shape for a crescent moon.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I used the fuzz brush to paint stars in the sky. I saved the image to my camera roll.
I opened the image in iColorama. I used a preset under Adjust/Tonelab at low opacity for some tonal separation. I generally try the first six and the last nine or so presets.
I applied Effect/Glow at low to medium opacity to lend a magical air to the image.
I used Adjust/Levels. I moved the gamma slider to the right to increase the brightness, and I used the Min Input slider to deepen the contrast. I tried using Adjust/Exposure, but it blew out the highlights. Sometimes one works better than the other, so I often try both. Call this Image A.
I used Style/Flat preset 1. It looks ugly here, but I love the swooping lines and shapes, so I decided to go with it.
I applied Style/Simplify several times to smooth out the roughness. Call this Image B.
Going back to Image A, I used Style/Flat preset 18 with the first Feature slider all the way to the right, and the other sliders at their default settings, at low to medium opacity. Call this Image C.
I used Style/Tensor on Image B, using Image C as secondary image.
Then I used Style/Water preset 2. Call this Image D.
I opened Image A, and I used Style/Tensor preset 6, using Image D as the secondary image.
