Mission Accomplished

I've really been getting onto Adobe Photoshop quite a bit these past few weeks. My official Photoshop training starts this week, but I love to experiment to see what tools do what. Let me tell you about the artwork below, which will appear for the month of April at Park Station. This is my first experiment with Photoshop CS5...

The Goal: Use a disposable photo and a pencil sketch to create a fresh "pseudo-real" artwork.

The Photo: This image was taken during a fall festival at Heritage Village. The old train station was one of the few buildings not being used for reenactments and the abandoned structure urged me to capture it's image. With little action, the old platform was not a gallery-worthy shot but has been a great reference for wood grain and trees.

The Sketch: Originally a pencil sketch of a young painter with windswept hair, the sketch became the foundation of a self-contained figure who meshed nicely with the perspective of the old train station.

Step one - The original pencil sketch was scanned into my PC and loaded in Photoshop. A transparent over-layer was applied and used to draw the outlines with the pen tool.

Step two - Editing. removing the original, edits were made to the outline. The flowing hair didn't look realistic and was replaced by a shorter sporty cut. The curvature of the legs and arms was re-done to give a more appealing image.

Step three - Base colors were added and then given highlights and low-lights with the airbrush tool. Multiple texture filters were added to the clothing to create a denim texture and ripples.

Step four - Using the train station photo as a guide a "high pass" layer was created and used to generate an outline of the scene. Then a slightly brighter color scheme was used along with the watercolor filter to generate a new background.

Step five - A small sketch of an easel was found and used with another photograph with good wood-grains to generate an easel for our painter. The same watercolor filter was applied to mesh it with the background. Fan brushes were drawn in manually.

Step six - After a Gaussian blur was applied to the edges of each figure the multiple layers were re sized, merged and given drop shadows to create a final image.

Conclusion: The end product is meant to flow from the caricature of the painter, through the easel, to the pseudo-reality of the watercolor train station in a manner that compliments the whole work. This is meant to suggest that the image on the painter's canvas is the watercolor we see as a backdrop.