Gold

A demo of a "gold" surface setting, using just a "DAZ Studio Default" shader:

This uses a fairly simple recipe:

• Diffuse Color: [ 153, 94, 51 ] at 100% strength. When you use gold paint on a stage prop, a brown undercoat helps it "pop" better, so I figured it might be a good base color here. 8^D*
• Glossiness: 75% -- a medium-sized specular highlight.
• Specular Color: [ 238, 221, 102 ] at 95% strength.  A slightly greenish, desaturated yellow.
• Ambient Color is zeroed out -- don't need any glow-in-the-dark effect here.
• Bump is 100% of a -0.015 to 0.015 range -- fairly gentle. I use a sandy/gritty texture, such as TarmacTiled.jpg by Fran Baker, from her gallery at ShareCG.
• No Displacement or Normal Map.
• Reflection Color: 255, 238, 136 at 91.7% strength.  A desaturated orange-yellow.

Everything else is left at default values.

Lighting for this scene consists of only two lights: one spotlight at 75% intensity, creamy off-white in color, with raytraced shadows, and an UberEnvironment light, for simulated ambient illumination with non-directional occlusion shadows.  A suitable topic for a future post....

The Line-Up

Here's a line-up featuring three ladies from the Central Casting department at my studio: Magenta, Susan, and Tracy.  Although I've muddled the measurement function somewhat with the poses, hair, and camera angle, you can get a fair estimate by sighting between the top of each figure and her reflection. On the left, we have the standard Victoria 4 height of about five feet, ten-and-a-half inches. Our cheerful vehicle operator is around five foot seven, while the 1960s-esque blonde bombshell tops out at pretty much exactly five foot nuttin'.

Susan's basic proportions, although obviously dependent on some of the zaftig settings provided by the Morphs++ package, are otherwise remarkably straightforward V4 scaling tweaks.  Overall scale, 90%; hip, 102%; thighs, 87.5%; shins, 91.5%; abdomen, 90%; upper arms, 87%; forearms, 95%. Using Morphs++ again, her head was scaled up by 4 percent, while her feet and hands were scaled down by 2 percent and 4 percent, respectively. If you want to stick with freebies, Les Bentley's "Show Scale Dials V4" should provide what you need. (Just be sure to read his excellent notes.)

Wardrobe Credits:

• Magenta:
  • Evilinnocence's Bra for V4
  • The skirt from Terrymcg's Cosplay Costume 10 (I squished the waistband down a little.)
  • StudioArtVartanian's C-String (not visible from this angle, but a nifty item.)
• Susan:
  • Morphing Glasses (about halfway down that page) by Adam Thwaites
  • Marco's Tied Top for V4
  • Sunny Bikini (well, part of it, anyway) by bucketload3d
• Tracy:
  • SickleYield's Free Wrap Top
  • JoEtzold's S.H.A.D.O. Uniforms ("SD-Pant")

Hair and textures are as credited in their respective original appearances. Although I did expand the bun on Magenta's hair, given the Big Hair proclivities of her companions here...

Sylvia: Process Notes

Being an old monochrome pen-&-ink and graphite type, I have a pronounced tendency to fall into full tonal black and white renderings, unreasonably early in my drawing process.

However, when the topic is REDheads, this'll need a little more work.
All right then, let's drop in some more-or-less flat base colors . . .

. . . and use the old Multiply mode trick with the BW layer:

Uhm, eeuuuw! Well, that's gone a bit necro, hasn't it?
[Side Note-- This is one of my pet peeves with the default settings on consumer-grade 3d rendering gear: all the shading being added via deadening grays. On flesh tones, no less. What could they possibly be thinking?]

So, in years past, I used to use Image->Adjust->Curves with a nice preset I saved, to convert my grayscale layer to sepia. Which at least got the fleshtones to behave. But, it made touchup edits awkward, the layer no longer being in simple gray. And other items on that layer didn't necessarily need to be shaded in skintone sepia either.

Well, on an as-yet-unreleased project, I stumbled upon a sort of backwards use of the Overlay mode. Traditionally, you use it on a grayscale-patterned layer, to apply texture to a color layer below. But you can also use it to apply color tones to grayscale. So, here's Sylvia's overlay layer . . .

. . . and its effect on the BW layer:

Used a traditional orange-brown sepia on the props, and a magenta range for her skin shading. Neutral on the sclera and blue for the irises. And yet-- I can continue to edit my still-monochrome BW layer, while immediately seeing the final effect on the color image! Sweet!

Finally, flatten all the layers together, et voilà!

That's Some Giant Glowstick

And another render. This one was triggered by a brief thread in Chup's Poser Art Blog touching upon a technical lighting problem. Hey, an art-tech research question? How was I supposed to resist that? 8^D* So, about a week later... (!)

I'm not sure how useful this would be to Chup, unfortunately, as this is (again) a DAZ Studio render, and I don't know if Poser has equivalent weird lighting gadgets. But anyway-- this was rendered using omnifreaker's UberAreaLight and UberEnvironment2. The former, to provide a tube-shaped light source, and the latter, some general ambient lighting. I'm not sure if it's something I did wrong, or if it's a feature-- but having an UberAreaLight in the scene seems to disable shadowcasting on distant lights (i.e., a light source that emits parallel rays, like sunlight.) Specifically, if I try to toggle on their shadowcasting, they go out entirely! But I figured the same author's ambient lighting (and more) gadget would probably be compatible-- and it was. =Whew!=

I also added a couple of point-source lights, parented to the giant glowstick, to light up the inside of her hands and the ground surface near the tip. For whatever reason, the area light seems to illuminate only past some minimum distance, and I couldn't puzzle out a setting that affected that behavior.

Victoria 4.2 is still from DAZ3D, of course, and the other visible objects (apart from the UberAreaLight giant glowstick) are my usual motley crew of Gnabbist-built geometrics. Including that odd helmet-like thing on her head.

Gnabbist
-- "That's some bad hat, Harry."

Blaze

A foray into a new medium. I've been immersed in the learning curves for DAZ Studio and Blender for a while (and, to some extent, SketchUp, although I got addicted to that years ago)-- so, when an art jam over on the R3 board sparked an interesting idea, it ended up falling into that workflow.

It's in keeping with my personal tradition of pretty much ignoring the character, and instead indulging in hokey wordplay. Which explains why there's a blaze here, and a tidge of modesty...

Traditional 3D Renderer's Acknowledgments:
- Kozaburo built the "Messy" hair (and the "Allback" hair, which I pressed into service as a bun.)
- Adam Thwaites provided the unworn bra and the fire texture. (From the incredible wealth of freebies at his most-digital-creations.com site.)
- The Victoria 4.2 figure, what little she IS wearing, and the rendering application are from DAZ3D.
- Blender and UVMapper allowed me to convert my Sketchup models (a couple of geodesics, and the little miscellaneous scenery-filler standup that's carrying the fire) into a format that DAZ Studio could import.

All of the above being (astonishingly) free for the downloading...! A boon for impecunious artists-- provided, of course, that you can afford the massive timesuck of learning this stuff.

Educational Value: Pretty much the lighting.

The fill lighting comes from three "distant" lights, arranged at "random" angles to each other, to avoid having two soft shadow lines combining and painting a bold stripe across the model's skin. Or, to quote Dr. Spengler: "Don't cross the streams. It would be bad."

The firelight is simulated by three point-source lights of varying hues sprinkled into the vicinity of the fire prop. Which, like the sky dome, is completely lit by its own ambient light-- everything else is zeroed out. Including shadows, cuz it looks silly when your fire casts a shadow. 8^j*

One moderate spotlight provides the overall key light, revealing contours and casting shadows.

Gnabbist

Facial Foreshortening from an Odd Angle

As usual, there's never a reference photo around when I need one, so here's an old constructionist trick. The basic idea is to draw an "easier" view, in order to transfer dimensions to a more difficult foreshortened view.

I've sketched out a semi-plausible, full front-view face, with a few extra "bizarro world" and "transparent woman" lines. I'm using those to help keep track of what the eyes and their bony orbits are doing.

Then I run a few horizontal lines over to a rough profile, and start molding it to fit the dimensions transferred. Hmm. Looks like I've probably got the eyebrow ridge a tad "robust" in this quick example-- but I still think a good deal of the orbit/socket should be showing behind and around the bulge of the closed eyelid.

Anyway, I hope this little exercise has some utility for folks.

Keycap Removal

Juicyfruit wrote:
>
> . . . it looks like I can't get the key out
> without breaking something. Do you think I should try it anyway?

Here's a rough sketch of my method for pulling a keycap from the lower tier. The spacebar serves as a fulcrum. The "trick" is to pull the key fairly straight up; that's why I use both hands, my left hand serving to counter the torque being applied by the screwdriver in my right hand. Helps to have strong fingernails.

Every keyboard I've attempted to disassemble has been designed to come apart like this, without breaking. Work slowly, gently, but firmly. Heck, you can't make it much worse-- and the keyboard has to be either fixed or replaced. Good luck; take your time.

Two Dancers

Looks like I'm about to get interrupted again-- so here's a little work-in-progress sample to let folks know I'm still alive. 8^b*

These are a couple of supporting characters from an upcoming color pic. I'm finding that working up a fairly finished grayscale "underpainting" is a big help to me in the coloring stage. I have much more experience working in monochrome-- so it makes it easier for me to work out the values, composition, etc. What the heck, an "underpainting plus glazes" approach worked well for classically-trained oil painters for centuries, right?

The initial stage is fairly pencilish, as in the Aliza figure here; I gradually develop it into a monochrome "value painting," as in the more fully-rendered Kiara figure. Color layers for tone are applied "below" the value painting (which I'll occasionally tint to sepia for skintones), and highlights are applied above it.

Gnabbist

GIF versus JPEG

jestr wrote:
> Would you recommend .gif over .jpg?
> I thought .gif was mainly for animated bits.

For pictures with large solid-color areas and a modest palette, yes, I would strongly recommend GIF over JPEG format. For pictures with gradual-toned ("gradient") areas and thousands or millions of colors (like a photograph or a painting), I'd recommend JPEG format. (For a posting copy only-- you should always save the original in your paint program's native format. More on why in a bit.) I use each format when each is called for-- see my gallery site blog for examples of both.

Using the picture you posted as an example: The original BMP was 393,190 bytes; your JPEG was practically as big at 386,709 bytes; and a copy saved as a GIF was 70,080 bytes. (!) That is significant, since your entire audience is not on high-speed connections. The GIF also perfectly replicates every pixel in your original BMP, while the JPEG has changed and recolored some (zoom in and compare) as part of its compression method. That is to say, JPEG is a "lossy" algorithm, which is why you NEVER use it for a master copy-- ONLY for publishing to the web. Since you used just 102 colors in your original, that fits comfortably within the 256-color palette allowed by GIF.

Side note: PNG is another non-lossy format, but with less restrictive palette limitations-- IIRC, it can encode 24-bit color (16M colors) with an 8-bit transparency channel (for nice semi-transparent shadow effects, etc.)-- but it's not as widely supported (yet) as GIF and JPEG.

It was immediately obvious the first time I saw this picture that it belonged in GIF format-- this is exactly the kind of image that GIF was designed for. And a photomanip or painting or solid-modeling computer rendering just as obviously calls for JPEG. If an image is kinda in the middle regarding "solid vs. gradient" color areas, try saving both GIF and JPEG copies, and see which is smaller and/or looks better.

Hope this helps.

Gnabbist

L & L for Imaginos - In Color!

The line work is mostly undisturbed from the grayscale original. The biggest revision (read: "nuisance") was smudging out edge jaggies: somehow, during the resampling down to display size, the layers interacted to create horrible fringes. [Editor's Note: I eventually discovered that flattening the image first makes resampling go much more, uh, smoothly.]  I also removed the old pencilled cast shadows, in favor of a separate airbrushed layer.

While colorizing this image, I discovered a nifty timesaver for skin tone shading. I have a lot more experience working in black and white and grayscale, so it didn't take me long to smooth out my initial pencil cross-hatching into gray modeling. But grays look dead and horrible overlaid on a skin tone base. Using Photoshop's "Image -> Adjust -> Curves", I remapped the grayscale values to a variable-hue gradient, running from dark red through sepia to pale greenish beige tones to white. Much nicer overlay for the two base tones I used here. Also very quick-- and repeatable.

The gradient from green "lawn" to blue "night" added some depth, but it needed more cues. So I loaded a temporary image with Gaussian noise, applied a motion blur, and "tilted" it back with a perspective transform. Had to make it real big, to have enough height left after tilting.

Gnabbist

Drawing with an Art Tablet

Bic wrote:

Hey guys,

How the hell do you get used to drawing on this thing? I figured since my scanner was down, I should start learning how to draw with an art tablet, but it's driving me nuts!!!

Any tips or suggestions?

Do you find it easier to draw straight on the screen, or 'trace' a pencil sketch? I know I'm missing obvious questions but it's beddy bye time....

I include a sample of my measly sketches, (at the moment I feel better drawing with a ball-point pen!) These were done from scratch.

Any thrown bones would be gladly gobbled up...

Actually, your sketches are quite reasonable for first attempts with the new tool.

Is it the "disconnection" feeling of having to look up here at the screen while your hand is down at the desktop level doing the drawing? (I've been drawing via digitizer tablets for over fifteen years now, so I'm not sure I remember what felt weird about it when I started.) That feeling passes with practice.

I think it gets tangled up with the traditional method of looking up at a subject, then looking down at the sketchpad to draw. With a tablet, you have to force yourself NOT to keep looking down at your hand, since all the visual feedback is on the screen-- there's nothing to see down at the tablet. (Which answers the question of whether I draw directly on-screen!) Eventually your brain will get used to the difference, and not give you that conflicted feeling.

For lower-stakes practice, you might try some tracing exercises, then try drawing alongside a reference. Also just sketch simple blocks and cylinders and such. The idea is to do drawings that don't matter, just for the sake of training the new hand-eye coordination skills. The old "two faces to a vase" exercise is another good frivolous game. (Draw one grotesque profile down one side of the page, then mirror it to make a "vase" silhouette.)

Another tip-like thought: I find that my tablet usually ends up rotated a little counter-clockwise (maybe five degrees) relative to the screen. More comfortable for a right-hander that way.

What sketch tools are you used to? For a simulated pencil, I use a skinny Photoshop paintbrush, with the stylus pressure set to vary opacity. Lets me build up light, pencil-like lines.

For a simulated porous-tip marker, I use a medium-sized pencil, with pressure set to vary size. Very Flair™-like.

A bonus is using the X shortcut key to switch between a black and a white pencil.

I've attached a small sample sketch demonstrating these tools, and the goofy vase exercise. (Any light-hearted drawing game will do for practice.)

BTW, I strongly disagree with characterizing this as "off-topic"! Artist-to-artist help is one of the most on-topic things we do here, in my arrogant opinion. Does wonders for my morale, anyway. 8^D*

Gnabbist
-- wondering about scanning in a sketch done in ball-point pen...

Step 5 - Start the Fun!

[ Previous | Next ]



Add a new color layer behind the line art.

Then...
	Save your new .PSD file!

And start coloring! Have fun!

[ Previous | Next ]

Step 4 - Clean Up

[ Previous | Next ]



Switch to the Channels palette and delete the temporary channel mask you made in Step 1.

Having this channel mask in your file will cause Photoshop to restrict your choices of format later, when you're converting it into a postable .JPG or .GIF file. It won't even allow you a .JPG choice, and it'll use the channel mask to set transparency bits on your .GIF! (Usually hideously.) Merely flattening the layers won't remove it. (It's not a layer, it's a channel.)

This is the sort of thing that will drive you crazy at a quarter past unconscious in the morning, until you get used to using extra channels.



Switch back to the Layers palette. Make sure the Background layer is the active layer.

Next, we'll empty out the background layer, since the info's in your line art layer now.



From under Photoshop's main Edit pulldown menu, choose Fill... Use whatever color you like, at 100% opacity.

[ Previous | Next ]

Step 3 - Copy the Line Art

[ Previous | Next ]
In the Layers palette, make sure "New Line Art" is the active layer. I'm also going to hide the Background temporarily, by clicking off the little eye icon to the left of its name. Under Photoshop's main Select pulldown menu, choose Load Selection...



We want to load from the channel we made, "Line Art Channel mask." Click the OK button.

Photoshop's famous marching ants appear.

Make sure you're painting with the color you want your new linework to be. Here, I'm using black. From under the Edit pulldown menu, choose Fill...



Use the Foreground Color, at 100% opacity.

Under the Select pulldown menu, choose None, to dismiss the ants.

She's back!

[ Previous | Next ]

Step 2 - Add a Transparent Layer

[ Previous | Next ]



Make a new layer in the picture, using the Layers palette menu's New Layer... option.

I'm calling the new layer "New Line Art." (The other default values are fine.) Click the OK button.

By the way, don't be concerned by that 'Opacity 100%' setting-- that only applies to the new pixels we'll add later.

Right now, the layer is filled with transparent pixels, which is most of what we want. Think of it as being like the "cel" plastic that an animator uses. (The name comes from "celluloid.")

In the next step, we'll copy the line drawing onto this "cel."

[ Previous | Next ]

Step 1 - Make a Temporary Channel Mask

[ Previous | Next ]

We're starting with a simple line art image, which only has the one "Background" layer.



In the Layers palette, make sure the Background layer is selected. (Hey, it doesn't have much choice!) If you don't have a Layers palette, use Photoshop's Window pulldown menu, and click next to Show Layers.

Switch from the Layers palette to the Channels palette. I'm usually working in RGB mode by now, so all three channels-- Red, Green, and Blue-- show as selected. Select just one channel-- I'll click on Red here.

I did that so I could use the Channel palette menu's Duplicate Channel... option. (Which won't work with all the RGB channels selected.)

Check the Invert box, and give the new channel a name; I used "Line Art Channel mask." (Original, huh?) Click the OK button.

The result looks like a photographic negative of the original linework. 

Click on the RGB (master) channel, to put the view back to normal, and switch back to the Layers palette.

[ Previous | Next ]

Line Art on a Transparency

The Problem:
Okay, so we've obtained a line drawing-- pencil, pen-&-ink, or (as in this example) something in between. It's a single-layer picture: all of the information is right in the "background" layer, as Photoshop calls it. If I were to start painting directly onto it, even with a semi-transparent tool like the airbrush, eventually I'd cover it up. Indeed, almost immediately, the paler grayscale values in her hair, shadowlines, etc., start to disappear.

And there she goes, fading away under a green mist... What to do?

One Solution:
In Photoshop, we can copy the line art onto a mostly transparent layer. That way, we can add the color behind the line art layer, so we can't cover it up accidentally.

In other words, instead of opaque black, opaque gray, and opaque white pixels, we'll end up with opaque black pixels, semi-transparent gray pixels, and completely transparent pixels-- what I refer to as "line art on a mostly transparent layer."

The following is a brief synopsis of the method I use. If you're familiar with Photoshop jargon, you can just print out this list and be done with this tutorial. Or, if you prefer, follow along as I demonstrate each step.

• Step 0 - Get your Line Art
  Get some line art into a plain old flat, single-layer, background-only Photoshop image.
• Step 1 - Make a Temporary Channel Mask of your Line Art
  Switch to the Channels palette, pick one channel, and Duplicate it, with the Invert box checked. Display the ordinary channel(s) again (either click on RGB, or click on Black, if your image is still grayscale.) Switch back to the Layers palette.
• Step 2 - Add a Transparent Layer
  From the Layers palette, add a new layer. Make sure that it's the currently active layer.
• Step 3 - Copy the Line Art in
  Under the Select pulldown menu, choose Load Selection... Load from the temporary channel mask you made in Step 1. Click the OK button. Photoshop's marching ants appear. Make sure you're painting with black. From under the Edit pulldown menu, choose Fill... Use the Foreground Color, at 100% opacity. Under the Select pulldown menu, select None.
• Step 4 - Clean Up
  Switch to the Channels palette and delete the temporary channel mask you made in Step 1. Switch back to the Layers palette. Empty out the background layer, since the info's in your line art layer now.
• Step 5 - Start the Fun!
  Add a new color layer behind the line art, save your new .PSD file, and start coloring!

[ Previous | Next ]

Tutsie

For my "Line Art on a Transparency" tutorial.

Gee, folks, I apologize for the relatively *small* size of these files lately-- I think I've been doing images for the web too long...! 8^j*

This is even at full size, just as I drew it, directly into Photoshop. One layer-- now *that's* an odd thing to do for a "layers" tutorial, isn't it? Of course, the point was to show how to take a piece of B&W line art and apply it to a mostly transparent layer, to allow you to color behind it. I used a 2-pixel paintbrush, with the pressure sensitivity set to vary opacity, as a waxy-colored-pencil surrogate. Since I was painting on just the one layer, I used the "x" keyboard shortcut to swap colors between black and white, to have an eraser always handy.

I tried the "big eyes" effect here-- although that always gets my mind's eye picturing the cranial anatomy of small nocturnal primates! Looks like the net effect was a standard toon elf. If I were to point up her ears a bit, she could probably survive the trip over to our sister group, ABPEC.mythical-creatures.

I also see a vague celebrity resemblence, although an "elfinized" one. I'd be curious to hear if anyone sees it, or other ones I haven't thought of. Speculations?

I'm working on a colorized version, to act as a "final result" illustration for the new tutorial. If any of our colorists feel like taking a try, please do. Again, I apologize for the diminutive full size of this image. But hey, if you use my "temporary channel mask" tip to get the gray pixels properly semi-transparent, no problem, right? 8^D*

Seriously, using Image Size with 'Nearest Neighbor' mode would let you double or triple it for more elbow room, without introducing artifacts when you resize it back down with 'Bilinear' or 'Bicubic' mode.

Gnabbist

Rajina (with Tutorial Commentary)

Here's my second "student pic" for our local airbrushing academy. (Hey, getting a bunch of artists together to swap ideas is a time-honored teaching technique.)

Being a beginner at this airbrushing, I hit a few surprises along the way. I think they might be helpful to other beginners, so I'll note them here before I start taking them for granted.

I started with a solid, flat base color layer for each object, as Bigboote recommends in his tutorial. Also set up a simplified outline drawing layer, a "lights" layer, and a "shadows" layer (for each object.) With only those four layers and a dummy blank background displayed, I selected the dummy background color and inverted the selection, so my subsequent thrashing about would stay inside the lines. 8^D*

I used Bigboote's suggested variation on his Insta-Shade™ trick to initialize the "shadows" layer. Took my cross-hatched sketch (I'm an old pen-&-ink, graphite, and colored-pencil guy) and subtracted my simplified outline drawing from it (copied the outline into a temp channel, used that as a selection on the cross-hatch sketch layer, and 'cut' out the stuff under the outline.) Then I Gaussian-blurred the heck out of what was left. Thanks for the warning, Bigboote; it is a lot easier that way.

I kept my "shadows" layer monochromatic for this time around; I know some color theory, but I figured I'd better keep the number of variables simple for myself when just starting out. (Desaturated the layer to grayscale, then used Image - Adjust - Hue/Saturation to colorize it.) Since I used an olive-ish (a bit rich in the green) base skin tone, I used a dark, saturated red, with transparency of the layer set to 80% or so. That way I got some of the neutralizing effect of a transparent complementary color, so my monochromatic shading wouldn't be entirely lifeless. (Mmmm, color theory-- aglglaglll...)

The "lights" layer was also monochromatic; however, its transparency was set to 100%, so I could have fully opaque highlights where needed. Kind of like gouache on top of watercolor.

Then there was much thrashing about with monochromatic airbrush strokes.

Here's an UNFAIR ADVANTAGE tip: Set the eraser to airbrush mode, with the same 20% pressure setting as your regular airbrush tool. Then paint boldly, knowing you can gently back out any goofs. (Seems to me this feature would be difficult to duplicate with real media.)

I figured out why the blur brush tool has little to no effect on airbrushed layers. Airbrushing uses the layer's transparency channel to do its smooth-transition effects. The blur tool only affects the color info of the layer, not its transparency channel.

However-- here's another UNFAIR ADVANTAGE tip-- the Smudge tool does affect both the color and the transparency of a layer! I "cheated in" quite a few subtle adjustments by smudging my airbrush strokes, instead of erasing and repainting.

I did the modelling using the "shadows" first, then switched to the "lights" layer. Man, just like my first time using a white Conté crayon (pastel pencil) on colored paper! All you have to do is think where the light would fall, and paint it. Too easy.

Once the first pass of rendering was pretty complete, I decided to amuse myself by sticking in a solid black layer, to check out the "Elvis on Velvet" effect. Hilarious. But also useful...

UNFAIR ADVANTAGE tip #3: This is a great way to make sure your lights are at balanced, appropriate levels. I had gotten a little too heavy on the toe highlights, for example; against a black background, they glowed like beacons. A litle gentle dimming with an airbrush eraser, and they receded to their proper place. I couldn't even see that error against the ordinary skin midtones.

Naturally, I immediately checked the "shadows" layer against a white background.

Being, as I've mentioned, an old pen-&-ink guy, I kept my outline layer. I did soften it a bit with transparency. It'd also be interesting to try colorizing it, or a very gentle Gaussian blur, or both.

=WHEW!= Bigboote, I don't think you have an exclusive on rambling... (Don't worry, Imaginos, I'm archiving this note for eventual tutorial use, in case anyone else finds it useful.)

Anyway, I think those were the the nifty tricks I stumbled upon. What an education this group is!

Gnabbist

[Followed a few minutes later by...]

Oh no! An evil sorcerer has transformed the Princess into a golden statue! He then ran off, muttering some gibberish about "Gaussian blurs," "Image - Adjust - Levels," and "Find Edges." There was also a lot of nonsense about hue and saturation, too...

=Ahem.=

Well, since I still had the "lights" and "shadows" layers separate, I decided to try some color variations. Then it became a challenge to see if I could get a metallic effect just through transforms of layer copies-- i.e., no new airbrush strokes. Sadly, there are probably one-step filters available commercially to do this sort of thing. But, what the heck, I did it anyway. Fairly amusing.

It's too late at night here to write this up right now. (Thank your lucky stars: you've just escaped from another rambling diatribe!)

Gnabbist