Masques' layer masks pt1

Hi all..

Got a gig for a swarthy beduin type on a camel. I personally never found camels to be too erotic, but it's always an education to see exactly what type of weirdos there are in the world.. :)

What we're going to do here is a step by step from go to whoa, which is going to be insanely boring and of dubious use to those of you who aren't running photoshop and a graphics tablet. The rest of you can just skip straight to the post marked 'final'(#20 or so) and pic up the finished version of the pic.

The initial drawing was done on it's own layer. Simple gradient fades give the sky/sun, another layer gaussian blurred for the sand. I always finds it helps to throw the vagueries of the background in at the start, for values/coloration etc.

The lighting model we're going for here is backlighting with lots of ambient lighting. The problem of course being how to delineate areas that are technically in deepish shadow, with no secondary lightsource.

Please excuse the somewhat disjointed and/or repetitive nature of the accompanying diatribe.. it was done very piecemeal over some time, and if I wait for the time to edit it so it really makes sense, you'll never get to see it..

There's going to be a lot of talk of layer masks in this tutorial, which in many ways completely supercedes/contradicts what I've said before. Layer masks are our good friends now. Watch..