Colored Artwork
Lately I have been thinking more about coloring some of my artwork. Last year I purchased a Wacom art tabled (9"x12") and I haven't really used it since. My excuse is only that I was having difficulty scanning my line artwork and then picking the black lines off the page with an invisible background. My set goal this morning was to create a process that properly isolates and picks my black lines off the page. First, the results:
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I am pretty happy with how the picked up black lines look. I took a color selection from the middle of the line, used the select color range option from the menu and threw the fuzziness up to about 170. Cut and paste. Do it a couple times with different fuzziness and blend the results. I tried feathering the selection and ended up with that irritating white halo that has plagued my previous attempts.
For the coloring, I used Photoshop (and this is really only a test, anyway). First I changed the background to the gold color. I created different layers for the branch color and the leaf color, and sandwiched them between the black lines and the background. Using various brushes I layered in the basic colors, working my way up to more detail. The results are pretty good but it has the look of having colored using markers. For my color palette I used a scan of a real Japanese painting and just went back and forth with the color picker. I ran each of the color layers through the pastel FX (had a positive effect but I'm still not pleased with the brush's look) and created a diffusion cloud layer on top of th background (put the layer mixing to burn) in order to give some variation. All in all it doesn't look too bad for a first try. I want to try this in Corel Painter but I am not as familiar with the software. We will see...
I am pretty happy with how the picked up black lines look. I took a color selection from the middle of the line, used the select color range option from the menu and threw the fuzziness up to about 170. Cut and paste. Do it a couple times with different fuzziness and blend the results. I tried feathering the selection and ended up with that irritating white halo that has plagued my previous attempts.
For the coloring, I used Photoshop (and this is really only a test, anyway). First I changed the background to the gold color. I created different layers for the branch color and the leaf color, and sandwiched them between the black lines and the background. Using various brushes I layered in the basic colors, working my way up to more detail. The results are pretty good but it has the look of having colored using markers. For my color palette I used a scan of a real Japanese painting and just went back and forth with the color picker. I ran each of the color layers through the pastel FX (had a positive effect but I'm still not pleased with the brush's look) and created a diffusion cloud layer on top of th background (put the layer mixing to burn) in order to give some variation. All in all it doesn't look too bad for a first try. I want to try this in Corel Painter but I am not as familiar with the software. We will see...