Project 4 - Coloring Scanned Artwork: Variations

To get the baseline black and white image I followed the instructions in the text to double the width of the canvas, select, clone and use the Free Transform command. I then flipped the horizontal, nudged the selection into place and loaded the RGB channel as a selection. Again following the text I reversed the selection, made the line art layer and then filled the selection with black. I selected the background layer, then deselected it and filled it with white. I then locked the transparency of the line art layer. I made several copies of this image to try different things.

It was pretty overwhelming to look at all the brush presets because there was so many to choose from. For the first image I finally choose a basic brush at 60px and and a special effect brush called hypno lines that had some interesting patterns. I brushed over the image with the 60px basic brush with a darker color and then used the hypno lines brush with a lighter color to create some texture. This was pretty easy to do because I locked the transparency of the line art layer.

For the next image I first set the foreground color to a dark warm brown and with a basic brush of 48 px colored over all the black lines. I created a new layer to fill in with colors and textures and moved the layer backwards as in the text. I selected the paint bucket tool and clicked in the shapes to fill the shapes with various colors. I found it useful to select large thumbnails for the color swatches because the default swatches were so small. I also had to enlarge the image several times so that I could fill in the small shapes without flooding the image with the color.

I had a lot of fun trying out different filters in the filter gallery. I selected the color shapes I wanted to use a filter on with the magic wand tool and the shift key. That seemed to work fine for this image. I used the stained glass texture for the peach color on Zac's "forehead". It actually looks like snakeskin to me. The yellow rectangle in the middle of the forehead was filled in with a darker yellow and then I used the hypno lines brush again with a lighter yellow for the swirly pattern. I also used the texturizer, crosshatch (eyes), and rough pastels filters on some other shapes. I used the plastic wrap filter for the "nose".

For the last image instead of choosing a color to paint over the black lines I picked Styles and loaded the photographic effects. There was one effect called blue tone w/ shadow that made the lines look three dimensional with a bluish shadow. I used the paint bucket tool to fill in all the shapes with a light yellow. I selected the colored fills layer and then created a pattern layer and made it part of a clipping mask (not quite sure what that means) by checking the Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask.

There were a lot of patterns to choose from but I eventually selected the gauze pattern. I choose Hard Light from the Layers palette and changed the opacity to 69%. That allowed the gauze pattern to show through the yellow colored fills layer.

The result was interesting. It looks like the lion sketch is made out of string and it is draped or tacked over a light yellow gauze canvas.