From Pop Art to Porcelain

This lesson covered a wide variety of subjects. I'm so glad that I had a tablet for this homework. That came in real handy doing the Pop Art picture and using the mask for other applications.

Line Art from a Photo

Janee gave us four different ways to convert a photo into line art. I tried them all, and I found that some pictures are not good candidates for line art. For example, I had a picture of a couple of mushrooms growing in a lawn. That did not work well since all the blades of grass created edges which took away from the mushrooms. Another picture I tried was of an old sugar mill on an island in the Caribbean. The problem I had with this one was that the old walls were so crumbly and flaky that the walls gave more edges in the center of the wall than on the corners. So the building lacked definition.

But just to show that you can't predict what will work, I tried a photo I had taken of a couple of sailboats cruising through a channel between two islands. I thought that would never work out, since it wasn't like Janee's well-defined photo of mushrooms. Much to my suprise, that photo worked out great. The method I elected to show here used the Smart Blur (Filter > Blur > Smart Blur) with settings of Radius 3 and Threshold 25. This was followed by an Image > Adjustments > Invert to convert the white lines to black. I liked this technique because it gave the softest lines which I thought fit the mood I wanted of two ships cruising indolently through the Caribbean. The other methods gave very harsh lines, and that was not what I wanted.

johnlinedraw.jpg

Pen-and Inked Watercolored Effect

I groaned out loud when I saw that I had to do a new watercolor effect photo just to get started with this section. But I went back to the previous lesson and reread the notes and applied the watercolor technique to the photo of the two ships (or are they boats, they are so small?). I even did the watercolor fade effect on the border of the picture. Then I followed the process to make the line drawing appear on the edges. I thought Janee was fooling us when she talked about applying a modification if we had a watercolor edge effect. But I had done the edges that way when I created the watercolor. So I followed her approach, and much to my amazement the additional layer and mask took away the lines from the border. I loved this assignment, and I loved the end result.

johnpaintink.jpg

Poster Effect

This section was tough. I could not find a great photo for this work. It was ok for the two toned, but kinda sucked on the dithered. Oh well, here goes. My choice for a photo was of a bronze statue of a Union Soldier that I took at Gettysburg, PA. The contrasts in this photo were so strong that by the time I ran my Threshold layer, I did not have much left to run a Burn Tool over. The instructions to add a "Color Fill Adjustment Layer" fooled me for a while. I could not find anything labeled that. Finally I added a new Solid Color Adjustment layer since it was the only adjustment layer with the word color in it. I filled it with a yellow color, and then I put the layer in the Lighten Blending Mode. I prayed that this was what Janee was going for. Sometimes instructors adopt a shorthand language that not all students can follow. This was one of those times. But I got a colored photo. When I saw what the color did, I changed the color to blue, since this was a Union man. I still don't see where the two colors come in, since I only used blue. Is white suppose to be the other color?

johnposter2color.jpg

Dithered - Indexed Color

I used the soldier again, but I am thinking that there were so few colors to start with in this photo, that when I downselected the number of colors, it did not have much effect on the picture. Perhaps a picture with more colors would have produced more exciting results.

johndither.gif

Pop Art

I worked harder on this section than any other. I am not sure why we were told to make a two-color poster effect on our photo when we never finished the process by choosing two colors. That instruction did not make sense. I also had a page break in the middle of the printout of Janee's second layer, so I had to go back to the web page to see what it was. [Don't mind me and my whining. I am at the start of a kitchen remodeling project and have spent the past 5 days unloading all the cabinets in the kitchen. They tear out the old cabinets next Tuesday, and start jack-hammering up all my tile floors on Wednesday to get ready to lay new wood floors. So I am a little crazy now. Sorry Janee.] I chose a photo of my wife, myself, and our daughter for this exercise.

I added a separate layer for each of the colors and painted the colors using a hard brush. I changed the mode of each color layer to Darken. I did the Threshold bit, and added black lines in a layer I put above everything. The lines helped define color spaces and missing chin lines on each of us. I downloaded Janee's halftone brushes, and used them to make a dot layer. The dots were too far apart, so I made a new file and filled a layer with the dots. I copied the picture back into my photo of the three of us, resized it to make the dots smaller, and clipped it to the skin tone layer. I wanted more than that, so I added another layer between the halftone layer and the skin tone layer and filled it with a slightly warmer skin tone. Then I added a Gaussian Noise Monochromatic and then added a Spatter filter effect. I also clipped this right above the skin tone layer. So I ended up with the halftone dots and the extra filtered skin tone both clipped to my layer that contained my skin color painting for the faces. The picture ended up ok, but certainly not like Lichtenstein. Oh well, there is always next time.

johnpop.gif

Porcelain Effect

I approached this section with a smile on my face, because I knew what I wanted to capture with this kind of halo effect (aka porcelain effect). I wanted something that was not a baby and was not a mother. But I wanted something that would feel good with the porcelain effect applied to it.

I relearned the lesson that it is important to read all of Janee's instructions before starting on an individual picture. I read the first part of this section and saw where it recommended cleaning up the photo, using the Clone Stamp if necessary. So naturally, I spent a half hour cloning things out of the background. Right, that's when I noticed that the next paragraphs said you don't have to worry about the background since you are removing it anyway. LOL. So I pumped up the photo with Levels and Curves layers, and started. The photo was already black an white so I did not have to convert. I added the mask to a Merged Visibles layer (I love that new MV technique), and I removed the background. Then I selected portions of the photo that I wanted to have retain their crispness and lay outside the boundary for the Gaussian Blur application. I added the Gaussian blur to the image as a whole, with the areas to be retained crisp outside the selected area. I selected an object that I wanted to further diminish and blurred it again to remove it's focus. I rather like the end result. What do you think?

johnporcelain.jpg

That's our son John, in what he believed was one of his more formidable poses aboard a Harley. Of course the motorcycle was not his, but he looked good on it. The real technical challenge with this photo was removing the car that was parked next to the motorcycle. I removed the car using the mask over a white background. The tricky part was removing the car while retaining the clear windscreen on the bike. I kept his mouth, eyes, nose, earring, and the badge draped from his neck out of the Gaussian blur application. I selected the motorcycle and applied a reduced Gaussian blur a second time to further reduce its visual impact. I added highlights to some of my son's hair and upper left shoulder following Janee's approach. I loved the end result.

Well, it is the end of the course. It has certainly been filled with challenging tasks, and I learned a whole lot more having taken it. I am pleased at how much more natural it feels to use Masks after completing this course. That might not have been the central focus, but it sure was the greatest benefit for me.