Okay, I have sometime to knock out a few more
portfolio pieces since I am shooting for a May deadline so I can try to make it
to Spectrum Art Live and pick up some work. I want to do more to the level of
this last piece “Artemis & Orion” which has gotten some good reviews. The
sketch for it did in-fact just get me 1st place at Sketch Theatre
Forum’s monthly contest Lover’s Embrace, which is a prize of 15 Gnomon DVDs ad
worth a bit of money. So that will help my education and replace some of the
one’s I had that were lost when my computer was stolen this past August. Here
is the sketch.
Now for a little bit of education today and one of
the things that bothered me for a long time until I talked with Justin Gerard.
Great guy met him at Spectrum last year. He recently married Annie Stegg,
another wonderful Illustrator. Together I think they are trying to corner the
market in storybook illustration. Justin had some wonderful prints of
watercolour pieces he had done. So I asked him how he got such deeper colouring
with watercolurs. He told me that he scans the original then places a multiply
layer and an overlay layer on top of it in Photoshop. It is a simple thing to
do but it works wonders for the piece. I recently used it after scanning pencil
sketches to get a clean line but still retain the actual look of a sketch. I
couldn’t be happier with the results. Though I will say given the parameters of the Sketch Theatre competition I didn't use it on the image above.
The whole simple process is as follows:
1st Scan your sketch or drawing at 600
dpi or better in grey scale (it looks so much better this way).
2nd Open it in Photoshop and duplicate
the layer twice.
3rd Change the 2nd layer to Multiply
and the 3rd to Overlay. Then adjust the opacity of the layers to
give you a clean look.
You may need more than one Multiply layer if it is a
light sketch and you want a darker line. If this is the case merge the 1st
multiply layer and the original scan then duplicate the now darker line work.
And that’s it to having clean looking sketches as
you can see. It works well for any traditional pieces and even to heighten colouring
from digital works.
This one was done with coloured pencil over marker then scanned in and heightened with the method above before adding the digital background.
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