1. We start with the scanned in pencil drawing.
2. Normally I hit auto tone in adjustments, if I don’t get the results I want, I’ll play with the curves to increase the darkness of certain areas / try to replicate the pencil drawing a little better.
3. Just piddling with the curves.
4. To ensure there’s no noise in the background, I’ll completely delete the white around the drawing. I don’t use the magic selection tool straight away – as it’ll leave the little black dots you rarely see until printing. Instead use the marquee tool and go around the drawing roughly, and then use the magic selection tool to get rid of the white right up to the drawing.
5. White gone!
6. I’ll then zoom in on areas where the pencil work has gone a bit ‘clumpy’ often there are areas where lines have joined and stick out at you, it’s quite difficult to see on this, but there are some smudged areas between lines which stand out when you look at the whole drawing.
7. Using a combination of the eraser tool and the background eraser tool – clear out these areas.
8. I have a library of water colour textures, what I do is repeat them, and join them together using the same colour til I cover the whole image.
9. When you’ve covered the whole image you can use the base drawing to select the white area around it – you can use this selection to delete the texture which goes beyond it’s boundaries. So far he’s looking a little mental and prettttty saturated, but you can level that out later on. Also by this point I’ve painted onto the drawing to create the watch. (using my mouse and several layers, multiplying the colours on top of one another).
10. Here I’ve begun to add some definition of the base watercolour texture – painting on a grey.
11. I’ve added her eyes as seperate layers and have begun to erase some of the grey layer to add more definition.
12. Because the base layer is a single colour, and there are lots of variations in hair colour normally – I’ve used the marquee tool to select her head, and used the hue/saturation tool within adjust to shift the peach colour to more of an orange.
13. In a seperate layer I’ve painted on extra definition into the fur – which can be refined after you’ve covered your illustration more generally. Using the multiply tool it makes the colour more vivid.
14. I’ve begun to add more detail to her face, here I’ve worked on the eyes.
15. I’ve toned down the painted fur just by reducing the opacity.
16. I’ve painted up both of her hands.
17. Finally after messing with the layers, cleaning up the edges with an eraser, and reducing the saturation of the base layers, she’s ready to enter the world! š
I hope that was useful on some level š
Jamie