PAINTING JEWELS

One of my fave things to paint is jewels... especially when I’m doing Egyptian type art. I tend to use a lot of these types of jewels in my artwork (that being cabochons styled cuts) This is a rather old tutorial that I did when I first started painting – so its a bit out dated for my current capability. But the lessons you learn here will still apply to learning how to paint jewels.

Now this tut I'm going to call intermediate... you will need to know Photoshop pretty well, and it will take a good amount of time to do also... so you'll need patience. If you’re using a wacom, it may not take as long, but I’m using a trackball, so it takes me a good amount of time. You can also adapt this tut to Paintshop Pro (since the majority of people use Photoshop, that’s what I used) For this, I’m going to be painting a scarab beetle. You don’t have to paint a scarab per se... but it will teach you how to paint jewels and gold, nonetheless.

Two things to remember: Always put a new layer, when starting a new section. Also remember to save a lot – as a .psd layer. So, we are going to start off with a new layer. You want to do each part of the whole on separate layers, so that you can edit each part as needed.

You’re going to start by painting gold. Now gold coloring can be tricky, coz you don’t want it too yellow and you don’t want it too red. You want it to be a happy medium between the two, as gold is sort of buttery in hue. If you need to, refer to an actual piece of jewelry you own, to get the right coloring. I start off by painting an oval shape, in a light shade of beige. It doesn’t matter if the circle is perfectly straight or not, you can fix that later. And remember, its okay if you don’t have the perfect shade.... you can always alter that too later.

Then, make a new layer, and paint another smaller oval in the center of the bigger one, in a darker shade of the same beige color.

Now we paint the jewel on another new layer. I’m going to paint mine blue coz Scarab beetles are always Lapis colored (for funerary purposes) This time, I want the blue to be almost the same size as the darker beige, but slightly smaller. This is the bezel of the scarab.

Looks pretty flat so far, eh?? Well, it needs shadows and highlights, to truly turn it into 3d. Now this does take a good eye... you need to imagine how it would be, it if was real. So we're going to begin with the jewel itself. First you take the darken brush, set to say 74 px (tho, whatever you want really, just don’t go too big or too small) Then you’re going to darken the entire edge of the jewel. A real cabochon will have a shadowy edge... and painting the darkened edge gives the illusion of it being domed.

Now you will need to use the dodge tool, and put it in shadow range. You want the brush size to be relatively small... but not too small. I put mine at about 47 px. Then youre going to highlight certain areas of the jewel. This does not have to be perfect, but a shine will usually occur toward the outside of a jewel, and on both sides, but not exact to one another.

Now its starting to look a little more like a jewel. But you need to tweak it a little. Go to image/adjustments/brightness & contrast. Here you’re going to drop the brightness a little and up the contrast. For brightness, I did -30 and for contrast + 30. You can do it whatever setting you wish, this is just what I felt was good for my jewel.

Now we're going to smudge it... to smooth it out and make it blend better. Also, want to smudge out any odd edges from where we first painted it, so that its perfectly round (or as best as you can get it) This takes some time and practice and a steady hand.

Ok the jewel is done - for now. We may come back and want to tweak it, when the rest is done.

Moving on down to the next layer, this is where we painted the darker beige color, or the bevel of the scarab. Time to tweak it so that its more real. You wanna take the darken brush (range: Shadows) and go around it a little bit... but inconsistently. Then, go back to image/adjustments/brightness and contrast and pull the contrast up til you get a desired color like mine. You can also go to blending options (right click on the active layer) and add a pattern overlay. At least, that’s what I did on mine, to give it a more shiny and erratic appeal. Just mess with the settings there til you’re happy, experimenting with the layer mode and the different patterns. Also, we'll want to drop shadow, so that the gold on this layer, casts a shadow on the first layer. That is also under blending options. You’ll also want to smudge this layer perfectly round, like we did the jewel.

Now onto the last layer. We'll treat this one just like we did the last layer, darkening and highlighting, and experimenting with the blending options.

Well its a jewel, but not very scarab like yet, is it?? Basically, there are a few things we want to add, to make it a scarab beetle. Firstly, scarabs are usually depicted holding a red jewel. This represents the sun, or Amun Ra. So I’ve added the red jewel, just as I painted the blue jewel, also with a layer of gold.

Then, on top of the blue jewel (which makes up the scarabs body) you want to paint a gold "T" So on a new layer, you will paint the T. To make it easier (and so the line is straight) you’re going to click the paintbrush on one side, then hold shift, then click again on the other side. A straight line will appear.

Finally, the wings. Now these are tricky. First you want to paint one side with the gold and then duplicate the layer, flip horizontally and then add it to the other side. This is so that its consistent and the same exact shape on both sides (plus, it makes it less work)

The jewels are also tricky. You may want to paint a guide line on a new layer, so you can color the jewels inside the lines. You paint these jewels the same way as the others, except that they’re square. Once again, paint and finish one complete side, then duplicate the layer, flip horizontal and add to the other side.

At this point, you may want to clean up the scarab a bit, by erasing edges or using the smudge tool to straighten things out. Then we're going to merge our layers, so that the entire scarab is on one layer. To do this, you want to merge down, instead of merge all, starting with the top layer. Now this unto itself is tricky, coz if you merge them down on top of each other, each layer will take on the properties of the other layers. So what you do is go down to the very bottom layer, and make a new layer. Then, starting with the layer directly above that, you merge each layer on top of that down onto the one new layer. Keep merging until the entire scarab is on the layer you just made. Here you can tweak the settings one last time... either the coloring, brightness and contrast or whatever you feel it still needs.

Now for it to be a true jewel, it must sparkle and shine. To do this properly, you’ll use the paintbrush. Now you’ll want to pick a color that’s close to gold in the scarab. Then set the brush opacity down to about 50% and make a new layer, and put the mode as screen. Now make the brush size relatively small, but bigger than the edge of the scarab's gold. Now you’re going to dab in spots erratically. Reason for this, gold will shine on other objects, not just within the scarab. This will make it so when u add it to an image, it will shine onto the skin or cloth. Then with the highlight tool, you can reinforce the shininess in the scarab and jewels.

To finish it off, I merge down the last layer, with the highlights painted on it. Then I add a Gaussian blur set to about 4.0 pixels. Then, right after, I go to edit/fade Gaussian blur. You will see a new menu pop up with layer modes. I used "multiply" on mine. You can play with the different modes and opacity, to get the desired effect.

I did a little more editing after that, to get mine to where I wanted it. Like for instance, I decided I wanted the final to have smooth gold, so I smudged it all smooth... reinforced the shadows and highlights and did a little more cleaning up.

So here is my finished scarab: