20% Time 2/26/08

This week I hit a veritable mine of tutorials.  I stumbled upon a site (http://www.snowdrip.com/tutorials/) that I had never been to before; it does not have that many tutorials as some others, but the effects are all very cool so there is not any of what I like to call “wasted space”.  However I had to chose one of the tutorials to do this week, and so I ended up choosing the one called comic art style.  It was fairly easy to do, but I added a lot of extra stuff to it to make it into an actual picture instead of just a background.  It is called comic art style because it looks like those stylized comic book pictures people keep making.

First, I followed the tutorial pretty well, I created the pattern, filled a new document and then spherized it to make a bunch of concentric circles.  Then I went on and applied it a bunch of different times in different places.  The main difference was that I think the author had more time than I and took the extra time to rotate his selections and make nice neat little divisions to create depth.  Next, just use the filter ink outlines and then, overlay a color gradient to colorize it.  I then got a new layer, filled it with a gray color and changed the blending to overlay so the colors were richer than I had chosen.

I then took the tutorial further.  First, I added two lightning bolts and ink outlined them (along with the little ‘boom’ shape in the background).  Then, I added different colors and styles to each of them to make them stand out.  Finally, I had to have a subject and I found the perfect one on flickr:

 cc “Reluctant superhero” by ashleyg

I just used a mask to take out all the extra background on him and used the clone stamp to erase the thumb and extend his cape.   I had to go back a few times to use the burn tool to darken some areas, and I changed the opacity of the shapes to keep them from looking too harsh.

I thought the outcome was actually very cool and funny.

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