In contrast to the other two previous letters, I chose to do something different with this one and turn it into an entire island scene
I prepped the lines following the method I'd done for the other too scans - the main difference here being to make the lines 100% black I stuck them through the "Threshold" adjustment. Threshold is good for creating bold, strong lines but I feel sometimes it can damage the line quality too much for my liking. These ones didn't come out too bad.
Initially my aim was to make it look mysterious and glowy - like floating island on a planet under moonlight. These examples were created using a mix of various tools - the paintbrush on various opacities to build up the tone of the island with the burn and dodge tools used to add extra highlight and shadows - I also created a brush with slight changes in tone and scattering to create the mottled 'rock' texture.
Whilst this wasn't terrible, I felt that the colour scheme didn't really suit the mood of the original lines - also while the burn and dodge tools can look nice in moderation, no amount of layer-building and repeated painting could achieve the cleaner, less sloppy paintwork I was going for. At this point I scrapped it for something different.
This was achieved using opacity brushes and layer filters. I wasn't keen on the sunset hues, but I liked the result created with the Exclusion filter - plus the colour scheme was really nice and 'Jungle'-esque.
Using the scatter/colour brush I made, I discovered it was a really handy way of creating really nice analogous colour schemes very fast. This allowed me to create various levels of tone for my building work without having to mess about with the the opacity tools too much (which can be very messy to refine and get right - which is what happened with the previous trial) It also makes a very nice textural brush, which I used to create distant space junk trails and text on the rock surface to give the whole thing a little bit of extra detail.
I dodged part of the background to give an illusion of lens-flaring and light reflection bouncing off the waterfall - and it was done! I was definitely much more pleased with the second go than the first; this final just looks much more refined and less messy, and the colour scheme works so much better with the setting. This'd be pretty interesting used in concept development, I quite like the idea of having a range of floating island worlds.
Unlike the others the quality of this scan was fairly atrocious - largely grey and covered in lots of folds. No matter how hard I tried, in order to remove the folds in the background I had to lose part of the third bubble.
To rectify this - using the Clone stamp tool I took the bit of remaining texture left and re-stamped it over and over to build it back up again. After this I took an eraser to the edges to neaten it up more
I cleaned up the lines on the 'R' more and started dropping in colours set to "multiply" on a low opacity layer. The intended effect was to make it look like a mis-registered screen print (or just to see if i could recreate this effect digitally) but I thought the composition wasn't working well enough, and decided to change it.
All assembled, I thought this was better composition all round (I think you also can read the initials better in this layout) I really like the way colour goes down over photocopied texture - it creates an almost watercolour/painted texture which is pretty nice. This is definitely different than the other initials, perhaps bordering on more graphic art. I think the others perhaps answer the theme and tone better than this one does, but I still like how it came out from a visual standpoint. I'll probably play around with this technique more provided the tone suits it.
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