At the end of the last session, we'd worked on a series of scans to clean them up and make them more polished to work on digitally. This session, we worked on adding elements such as colour and texture to them to make them into separate finished pieces.
For the dragon, I started by adding some base colour and some basic detail using a multiply layer over my background lines. Multiply allows you to add colour without obscuring the layers underneath it - however, it does so in a way much like a stained glass window; adding another multiply layer on top of your first multiply layer will skew the appearance of the colours - so you have to ensure all your shade and detail goes onto one layer.
Next we started to look at adding texture - this is a stock photo of some ocean waves I took of google for the sake of experimentation (Any final work I create for other briefs would utilise my own pre-made textures/photographs; stealing photos and textures, even free-to-use ones can complicate copyright if you were producing work professionally) - To achieve this look, I set the layer mode of the texture to overlay which literally overlays the content onto the previous layers, without interrupting them.
I felt that the colours of the ocean texture hindered with the colours of the base layer too much, so I altered the hue and saturation of the texture so it fitted more to the original choice of colour. I then played with the levels to make it sharper and add more depth in shade/tone to the dragon.
I added some finishing touches - a sparkle to the dragons eye and scales/shade to the dragons wings and belly, and also some exclamation marks - and it was finished! I'm very pleased with the outcome of this one - The thick chunky lines work well with this style of work, it would look very appropriate in a kids book. I think I'd definitely work with broad felt tips as a line for scanning because it seems to go down much thicker and cleaner than fineliner tends to do in a scanner, which I found to be the case in the other scans I'd done.
Unlike the dragon image, A lot more had to be done with the lines on this image. The fineliner didn't react as well to the scanning and adjustment as the thick felt tip did - which left it looking very jaggedy. There were also a lot of line corrections that needed to be done.
Instead of getting rid of the jaggedy lines I chose to embrace that particular line quality by changing the corrective brush to a more textured one than the standard circular paint one. It took a few goes before I found a brush with a similar grain to the scanned fineliner
Instead of trying to paint the clouds here I sourced a texture of some pink smoke instead, which worked perfectly as a puff of magic. This is actually two layers of texture overlaid - I found at first the pink was too intense so I put a second layer of it over the top with a more yellowy hue - which helped make the details in the cloud stand out more.
To make integrate the texture more and make it look a bit less flat, I added some lines at different opacities over the shadows of the original clouds - opaque paintbrush highlights also help to make the texture "pop" a bit more and look a lot less like a texture hastily cut out with the lasso tool
To finish off, I edited the levels again on the base layer to make it really clear. There's still a bit of noise in the top left hand corner I missed though.
I think I much prefer the dragon as an outcome to this one, considering the quality of the fine-liner is degraded quite badly after going through a photocopier, then through a scanner and through various modifications in Photoshop. I think its a nice way to get a textured line, but if you want smooth clean lines I don't think this is a good way to go - I'll probably look into ways I can actually achieve nicer looking traditional lines on a computer at a future date.
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