Discovery and learning don’t always have to come at the expense of laborious study and practice. Sometimes they are handed to us by the magician-teachers who simply tell us exactly what they have done, lifting the curtain and letting us see what’s behind it and in the works from beginning to end. That, at least, is how the learning starts for many of us. Certainly for me. I have been gifted, over the many years of my life, in which I was, am and will be a student forever, with a number of such generous teachers.
I can only return the favor as far as my skills and wit allow, but I hope I’m at least skilled and sharp-witted enough to make it worth a few other people’s while. Of course, the plain facts don’t complete the education by a long shot–the study and practice parts have to follow to make it stick and create anything useable out of it. What you do with the information, as they say, is what completes the equation. But isn’t it fun to share our little secrets, to let each other peek at what’s behind the facade of polish and confidence and see what we can make of it?
Herewith, another little set of iterations digitally made to convert a black and white graphite drawing into a full-color digital illustration.
Once again, I begin with a plain graphite drawing, scanned and very lightly cleaned to remove dust specks and make the scan match the original. I wish I had made the ‘lens’ look more curved or somehow indicated its thickness better so that there was a more logical reason for the eye behind it being moved that far from its expected location, but then I remember that this is, after all, an utterly nonsensical and *not* logical creature-person. Next drawing, perhaps. For now, I’ll play with the cards I dealt myself.
To begin the digital part of the process, I just did my usual small test of whether injecting color into a black and white original might bring out some useful or interesting aspects of the character (both the humanoid one and the character of the drawing).
Why not. What if I isolate a larger area and keep the illustration black and white but with the lens area being in full color? Hmmm. That could work. I ‘paint’ in the color, layering it bit by bit and erasing bits to add highlights or even out the application of the colors.
Strangely, I find that having only the lens area colored flattens out the image a little more than I expected. I think this might be in part because the color has reduced the contrast and visible texture of the graphite strokes. Maybe I’ll just add a bit more color over the other parts of the drawing. No, not quite enough, I’d say. So I add a Photoshop filter of ink lines to emphasize the drawn textures and contrast more deeply with the coloring.
Well, here I go again. I can’t resist adding color to the whole image. I think it balances the image better. But I’m married to the idea of letting the part seen through the lens be the only richly ‘full color’ part–the True Self, if you will, seen through this lens. So I decided to keep what wasn’t part of the lens itself or seen through it mainly monochromatic; a sepia tone for the face seemed in keeping with the sort of Steampunk creature’s vintage-yet-otherworldly quality. And then, of course, the face was flattened a bit by the color too, so I added the inky filter to that as well. And here we are. A day of tweaking and monkeying around with the drawing that took me a few days to draw, and here we are. On to the next project, my friends. Hope you find something compelling to do, too, even if as with mine, your projects only lead to more projects. Because that’s what happens when we share our ideas: they proliferate. Granted, some of them grow up to be really weird characters all on their own, but they do proliferate. Revealing, as they do, further parts of *our* character through *their* lens.
Art-Colored Glasses 