Archive for May, 2012

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Now in Technicolor!

May 24, 2012

My tentative journey into the world of color continues…

I recently had the pleasure of working with Corel Painter and I never want to go back. Here are a couple of sketches that I scanned and painted using Corel. I tried to give myself a 10 minute time limit in an attempt to create some sort of fresh, dashed off look, but then I got into what I was doing and lost track of time. Each of these probably took about 30 minutes to paint. Having the option to erase mistakes and undo regrets is at once the benefit and the curse of digital painting.

The above drawing is of my husband and my brother at Disneyland. I talked a lot about this and other drawings from that trip in a previous post. In this drawing I committed the sin of mixing moments, resulting in a very unenthusiastic looking Richard and Tanner among a crowd of happy theme park goers. The truth is I actually did the drawing of R&T after a long first day as they were sitting on a bench outside the park waiting for the shuttle to take us back to the hotel. The crowd of people in the middle ground was added here and there as we waited in various lines the next day.

This fountain was in the courtyard of the Sheraton Anaheim where we stayed during our trip. I must have drawn this in the morning on the day that we checked out, as I can’t imagine I would have been willing to sacrifice much Disneyland time on a drawing back at the hotel. I do remember being quite happy with it when I was done, and it was nice to rediscover it again and freshen it up with some fake paint.

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Restore Faded Color

May 17, 2012

So I went back to the Grand Canyon recently and did a handful of campfire drawings. I did the sketching and inking at camp and then colored them with pencil in the car ride home. Actually I only did some of the coloring in the car because (as usual) I got carsick and had to finish the rest at home.

That was easy part. But getting motivated to scan the drawings, that’s a whole different story. The first three drawings scanned with no issues.

   

But when I went to scan the last one I had some trouble. It came out way too faded…

Everyone just looked pale and sickly, which is not how I colored them. And the sky just looks white. This sometimes happens when I am scanning and it drives me crazy. I attempted to fix it by adjusting the contrast in photoshop to punch up the colors, but then I had to change the brightness as well, which made it come out too dark…

Finally I tried to rescan the drawing altogether (which took an enormous amount of patience on my part) and this time I noticed something that I have never noticed in all my centuries of scanning drawings: the “restore faded color” option. Just put a check mark in the box and wahlah…

You learn something new every day.