Enhancing Designs - Airbrush Tool
by Nick Ustinov

Let's see figure out what is the difference between amateur and professional design. There are many things professional artist should look into. Colors, layout, proportions, typefaces - this all brings a feeling of style. What I am trying to say is that whatever you create should have it's own style. I start series looking into airbrush tool and trying to change looks with it. We will use Adobe Photoshop as a tool.

Just like grafitti you see on the walls around the city - airbrush can turn your Adobe Photoshop into 3D drawing software without even modelling anything. You don't have to have extraordinary drawing skills to create simple 3D drawings. All you should remembers when using airbrush  is (well, we take the simplest case) that what looks lighter seems closer to you, whatever is darker seems farer. Notice that I use word "seems" here, since we don't actually calculate correct lights, shadows and so on. We just create a visual effect of depth.

The image you see is not a photo or retouch. It's a part of the image that was all handdrawn by me for Assembly'97 competition just using a mouse and an airbrush tool in Adobe Photoshop. The principle is just the same - lighter areas looks closer. In fact, I was in big hurry to finish the picture so there are some mistakes. Of course it takes alot of time and patience to create complex drawings. Most probably you will not need this. Let's take a simpler example of creating a 3D ball.

	Let's start with a simple flat ball drawn using an elliptical selection and the filled with nice blue color. Do not deselect it, we will need the selection to control the edges. It is very important to have a good control of what you are airbrushing. Just like in real airbrush tool we can control Photoshop's airbrush quite well from Options Palette (Window>Show Options)
	Main control here is Pressure level. If you are a lucky owner of the stylus pen (I recommend WACOM) you can choose what will be controlled by airbrush pressure - either color darkness or pressure level. If you want to create really good looking images like the one I shown before you will need a tablet or stylus. Usually when drawing I have pressure set to from 8% to 20% depending on how precise is my object. To make a simple ball look 3D we can use 15-20% pressure. Pick up black color as a foreground color. Open Brushes palette. You will need a reasonably big and soft brush. I used 65 pixel wide one (from the default brush set).
	As I mentioned before I assume that the light comes from the front. So the edges of the ball should look darker. Accurately draw a circle by the ball edge a few times to make it darker. This step requires some practice, just be patient. If you did deselect the ball, this won't work. Ok, already looks better. Now, the middle area looks fine, we will use the color we had. Pick up the eyedropper tool and pick up the color in the middle (that nice blue one).
	Now, click that blue color and change it to a lighter one but in the same color scheme. draw small circle in the center of the ball.
	Finally, pick up the white, switch to the smaller brush (45) and draw a small white specular in the center of the ball. See, how we changed it all just using an airbrush? Now, scale it down and you have a nice looking bullet.
Airbrush can also be used for other things, not just creating 3D balls of course. You just have to expand your imagination. Let's say why not to paint a photos a little bit? I use airbrush in almost every image I create. Really, you should play with it and you will see how can it change the overall look of the design.