Tuesday Tutorial: Make it dirty!

(This is my first of what will eventually be a regular weekly feature: the Tuesday Tutorial. Because of my aforementioned storyboard job, I can't guarantee I'll be able to make weekly updates in the near future, but I will try my best.)

When you're working with photographs, adding new elements or combining pieces of other images, one important rule to follow is to make it dirty! Photos are never perfectly clean and precise, the way computer-rendered images are, and so it's important to give them the same imperfections as the photo, so they'll blend in seamlessly. We'll follow a rather silly example I've put together to (hopefully) demonstrate what I'm talking about.

1. Add the Additional Element. For this example, I'm starting with a photo of Minnie, after she got her first and so far only bath, above. I'm going to draw a simple cone paper hat onto her, and try to make it look real.

Here is a close-up of the image of Minnie with a simple cone drawn on her head in Photoshop. Though I did a fine job masking out her hair and shading the hat, it still doesn't quite fit in the image. (You may need to click on these images to see the larger versions.)

2. Add Noise to Additional Element. Every photograph -- and this includes photos of paintings and artwork, of course -- has some degree of graininess. This graininess runs throughout the image, and if your additional element doesn't have it, it will stand out.

I went to Photoshop's Filter menu, and to Noise. I added 2% noise to the hat. You'll need to look at the photo up close to see that the amount of noise you're giving matches it.

Keep in mind, it's important to make the hat on a separate layer, and to keep it on the separate layer, throughout this process.

3. Add Blur to Element. Every photograph -- even the world's best photograph -- is out of focus, to some extent. It may be the tiniest amount, but there's liable to be some bit of blur to the image. You need to blur your new image element to match the surrounding objects.

Note that in many photos, the amount of blur will vary from the foreground to background, so the right amount of added blur can help pinpoint the perceived depth of your new element.

I went up to the Filter menu again, went to Blur, and selected Gaussian Blur. I then gave the hat a small amount of blur -- just 0.7 pixels.

4. Do Whatever Else It Takes. As you can see from the finished piece, below, Noise and Blur were all it took for the texture of the image to match the photo. There may be additional steps depending on the photo -- if the image in the photo moved, and has a directional blur, adding Motion Blur may be needed. Sometimes lightening the opacity of the picture -- say, to 95% or so -- will allow background textures to show through. This usually ony works if the background behind it is fairly plain, without detailed objects. You also, of course, will need to make sure the colors work well too. But these first two steps -- blur and noise -- will get you on your way.

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Monday Morning Marty & Jenny

(Click on image for larger version)

Last week I started a big storyboard job that will take up all my time for the next month or two, so I didn't have time to draw up a new Monday Morning drawing today.

So instead I took a really sweet photo of Marty and Jennifer and applied a few Photoshop filters, did some nudging and finagling, and came up with this portrait of the two of them. Hope you like it.

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Monday Morning Minnie -- Variations

(Click image for larger version)



Taking the simplified image of Minnie from last week, I've made some simple variations to convey a series of moods or emotions.

(Thanks to Jack Atkins for the idea -- the "surprise" variation was his!)

My apologies for the lateness of this post. Blogger is having a problem uploading image files, and I've been trying since yesterday. It wasn't until now that it occurred to me I could upload it myself and then just link to the image here. Duh.

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Monday Morning Minnie -- How Simple is Too Simple?

(Click on image for larger version)


As you can see, I'm pushing the simplicity thing a little further this week! This is the first Marty/Minnie illustration I've done in vector format with the Illustrator program.

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