Country girl — electronics mashup

7/31/22

    Continuing with the June theme of electronics, Jim decreed that our starting image was any iPad that we could find and put something on the screen. I had come across this girl from Pixabay a while earlier and thought it would be fun to play with. Since it was a black-and-white line drawing, my idea was to color it in to give it a different feel. My right hand is getting pretty twitchy on the mouse, so I decided to start on my iPad so I could use a pressure sensitive pen with my left hand to color and all those details. Actually I thought I could select the spaces and use fill color, but there were too many breaks in all the lines. Drat!    

    Each color had to go on its own layer underneath the drawing, which thankfully had a transparent background. I started with the farthest distance, which was the sky. While I was there I used a couple of cloud brushes from Aaron Blaise to tap some clouds in the sky. I continued forward. The last colors I put in were for the flowers. I knew I wanted to place this drawing on a wooden plaque, so, I added a brown layer to the bottom of the layer stack. I took a screenshot of the photo shop for the iPad after I was done coloring. You can see some of the layers that I was using to color my work.

    Then it was time to work on my image on my computer. I have some brushes from Bittbox that look like wood grain, so I stamped a layer above the brown, and changed the blend mode to multiply. I also did a slight emboss to give texture to the wooden plaque. I added a different pattern texture in the FX menu for each layer of color I had created earlier. It's fun to play with blend modes.

    Now it was time to bring in the screenshot as a top layer. I lined it up with the layers below, and masked out where my partial composite showed.

    Once I was happy with the color, textures and masking, I opened up an iPad template (mockup) from AdobeStock. I stamped a composite copy of all the layers, and duplicated it in the appropriate layer of the template. I adjusted the color of the base layer and added a little light texture to make it resemble that old manila paper that we used to use in elementary school. I experimented with the rest of the layers in the template to optimize the look of my composite.

    All told, this project took a long time. For the most part though, I found it very relaxing. I don't know what it is about coloring — the act of moving the brush around or the thought process that goes into choosing the colors, but it appeals to me. I often open up an audiobook and my Pigment coloring app. I can lose hours doing that. It's always a surprise when I look up and three hours have passed. Here's the one I lost track of time for last night. Not the best, but not the worst either.

    Take care and stay well.