A Quick Photoshop Project

Now, I'm hooked on Photoshop. I've gotten the handle on all the basic tools I need to turn a black & white doodle into a full color extravaganza: coloring, shading, highlighting, layers, cloud effects/textures, "magic wanding", gradients, etc., etc., etc.

This piece I drew in about 35-45 seconds in pencil (I usually spend less) & about a minute-&-a-half to ink it just right. Looking back, I shouldv'e scanned this in before I inked it to show you what it looked like in quick sketch-stage, but it's too late for that now. Oh well, maybe next time.

The Photoshop process probably took me about 20 minutes. Unlike my first Photoshop tryout or the one I did over at Toon Platoon this week, this one was a lot less complicated to do. No haggard lines/shapes, not too many broken lines... just a simple composition between two people. Like I said on my last Photoshop post, the hardest & longest part to fill in is the eyes since they're not closed off. Practice makes perfect, though.

Instead of placing them in a plain, empty, colored space in the middle of nowhere, I decided to put a background behind them. After doing this, I realized that Steve-O & Randy stood out too much, like they were just pasted in there. While the background has heavily-detailed grass, sky & leaves in their path, they're basically flat & too 2-dimensional. The shading & the slight highlighting aided that problem slightly, but they still stand out quite a bit.

Also, the most common mistake I make when coloring is forgetting to switch layers. On this drawing, there were 5 layers: the original drawing, a duplicate of the drawing (with a few misplaced colors slipped in by accident), the main coloring level, the background level (path, leaves & grass) & a sky level. By the end, I knew what was wrong with the thing & the problems & brought up during the process, but since it was a practice piece, I didn't mind TOO much. I'm learning, aren't I?

Either way, I'm glad I now know how to handle this program better. With little more practice, I'll get a better hang of it.

I might use the original drawing for a future banner for the blog, but I'll have to figure out how to lay it out first. We'll see how things go. Maybe I can reach my Christmas goal after all!