Painting Technique - Monkey Cover #5

I'm just about done with the underpainting except for the bus interior and the monkey. This is a monochrome layer that establishes the darks and lights in the painting. This is a relatively new way for me to work but underpainting traditional technique used by painters for hundreds of years. Heck if it's good enough for Leonardo DaVinci, it's good enough for me.

To do this underpainting layer, I don't use black, I use a yucky, mix-all-your-play-dough-together kind of color and white. I paint this in Photoshop following the original pencil drawing that I scanned in. I use a couple of different paint brushes but mostly one called "Dark Pastel" which I think came with Photoshop.

There are some geometric areas of the image that I used Illustrator for. For example, for the grill of the bus, I created all those skinny dark areas in Illustrator, copied as paths into photoshop then used them as my selection. Then all I have to do is color them in. It's way easier than trying to draw them freehand.

I'm hoping to get the underpainting done tomorrow and start adding some color.