How To Draw Full Moon Wo Sagashite

Honestly, working with Arina Tanemura artwork is a lot of fun. <3 You can pull out so many effects for her rather pale coloring and experiment like whoa. xD

Requested by mobiuswolf .

How to go from to in Photoshop.
Uses Selective Color and Color Balance, so probably not translatable.

1. Get your base ready! I took this lovely Full Moon image and cropped around Izumi (I cropped this image to death btw and abused it for many icons xD).

2. Way too pale, let's make some new layers and fill it with:
- #2C2A2A, Exclusion, 100% (I love exclusion layers <3). Duplicate this and set it to Exclusion, 50% this time.
- #E5D8BE, Multiply, 21% (please experiment on this one and change the opacity if it's too dark or too light)

3. To draw out warmer colors take a Color Balance... adjustment layer with these settings:

Midtones: -42 0 20
Shadows: 30 0 5
Highlights: 13 0 0

Very pink, but oh well. We'll fix that later, I promise!

4. To make it even pinker (LOL, weird) take a Hue/Saturation... adjustment layer and go with the master saturation all the way up to +40.

Izumi's hair looks a tad to bright now, but that will come in handy later.

5. The image needs more contrast after all those color layers, so add this texture by dusty_memories on Multiply, 100% for this:

6. This tut wouldn't be any fun without a Selective Color... adjustment layer. My settings were like this:

Reds: -100 0 100 0
Yellows: 100 10 -70 4
Cyans: 100 0 -40 100
Blues: 50 0 50 0
Neutrals: 100 -16 -10 -18 (You might have to change the neutrals if your colors take a weird turn)

7. Brighter, but we can still do better. Take a duplicate of your base and set it to Soft Light, 100%

8. We're definitely getting there, but I want more shinies. Take another Selective Color... adjustment layer, this time with these settings:

Reds: -100 25 30 0
Yellows: -100 90 -20 -20
Cyans: 100 -30 -10 0
Blues: 100 20 0 0
Neutrals: -15 -20 20 -20

and duplicate this layer once:

9. You could almost leave it this way, but add another Selective Color... adjustment layer:

Reds: -60 30 5 -5
Yellows: 100 -50 0 0
Cyans: 0 -50 -100 0
Blues: 50 -100 0 0
Neutrals: 25 -5 -20 0

and one more Color Balance... ad. layer on Soft Light, 85%:

Shadows: -40 0 0
Highlights: 8 0 0

Depending on your image, these settings might be too much and make your eyes bleed, so change them as you see fit.

10. Whoops, before we get totally blind, let's fix these beautiful, yet overwhelming colors with a duplicate of your base on Multiply, 21% and another one on Multiply, 37% (I don't know why, but I didn't get the same result with one layer on 58% xD).

11. Almost at the end. Take some light textures for more shinies~. I used this by lil_brokenangel on Screen, 100%. I duplicated it once and moved it a bit.
Also, I learned a nice trick from inquisitory (need to give proper credit here^^): take a scribble texture (doesn't really matter which one, I used this from ohfreckle ), do a radial blur on it (spin around 15-20 should be fine) and set it to Screen, 100%. Erase disturbing parts.

12. A final step, if you feel like it: select all and copy merge. Paste this above all your layers and take a Radial Blur, 24 set to zoom, and erase some parts (I left only the edge). And finshed!

Questions? Just ask! :D

Other examples: