| I use a 3 airbrush set-up here (2 Paasche VLS and a Vega 2000), one for black, one for white and a Vega for colors with interchangable bottles . Black and white tend to contaminate worse and will slow down a color change. I used textile paint for this example (Aqua Flow). It dries superfast. You'll also need a ground. 50wt Stabilizer Pellon is available at the fabric store dirt cheap or, you can order 14" x 14" practice and display squares through the Airbrush Store (800-852-7874). I keep the viscosity of my mixture as it it shipped (a slightly milky consistency). At 50 psi it goes on smooth as glass. This is freehanded all the way with t-shirt ethics in mind but, don't worry about overspray. We take it out in photoshop. Have fun, use your own style, it might be better than mine. |
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Step 1
Using Red Brown, lay down your reference lines. I use a tight sketchy line and then go back in with a little loose shading. I give the eyes a little detail with some squggly lines and shade in the stem. |
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Step 2
Go in with Hot Orange, just absolutely blast it. Except for the eye whites and the stem and your pants. |
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Step 3
I go in here with Red Pure to further shade the lips, cheeks, chin and forehead. A little Opaque Yellow to brighten some highlights and Opaque White for further highlights and to brighten up the eyes. |
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Step 4
Here I go in with Red Brown again to tighten up detail. Then Violet to increase shadow and detail. Then Jet Black for the deepest shadows. |
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Step 5
Go back in with Opaque Yellow again to lighten the broad highlights and finally Opaque White for brightest highlights. The eyes... well, everything pops at this point. |
Now lay your pellon directly on the scanner bed.
Bring it in at around 300dpi, 3inches wide. This should give you plenty of digital info to manipulate.
Once in there, crop it where needed and check your size. Try to stay around 1 column wide.
In our finished piece we want 2 different images for a full color piece on uncoated stock. One full opacity image 240dpi for a 133 line screen (still a little digital overkill, resolution need only be 1.5 times the line screen for maximum quality) and the other, a 3 column wide sepia tone ghosted image for type overlay (which we will colorize brown in the page layout program). The resolution of the ghosted greyscale image doesn't need to be as high as the full color one, pixelation is much less noticable. If however you go extremely low resolution, you can acheive a really cool effect for background imaging. When we interpolate our image, our finished resolution will be 120dpi at 3 column wide.
Ok, back to Photoshop. Bring up levels and adjust to taste, making sure you've got good contrast. Is your monitor calibrated? I use unsharp mask here at 125,0.5,4. You'll resharpen it higher later.
Using the magic wand set to around 64 in the options panel (you might need more or less depending on the amount of overspray) select the white area. Using expand, try and get your selection as tight around the pumpkin as you can. You could manually select this using the lasso tool, but it takes a lot more time. |
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Once your selction is tight, feather it by 1 pixel. You'll still have a sharp edge this way. Delete the background. Select the airbrush tool and white color. Using an opacity of around 50, take off the sharp edges of the shadow and anything really obnoxious elsewhere. Take your opacity down to about 9 and with a big brush, smooth the shadows off to nothing. I use a graphics tablet for speed when drawing, and a mouse or keyboard for almost everthing else. It should look something like this.
Now convert this to greyscale and bring your contrast up in the levels box.
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Copy this to a new layer, delete the background and reduce the opacity to 30%.
Boo! |
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Don't forget to save these under different names. Like you wouldn't. If your airbrush skills are good and you have a descent computer system, you should have these ready to place in your layout program in less than 20 minutes. |
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While in Photoshop, you can always do your header to add a little value. |
Place these in Macromedia Freehand (or Quark) and resize to fit, in the program. Select your greyscale tif photos and/or text and pick a color. |
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Total time: Under 1 hour. No copyrights on clip art infringed here. And your client won't see this used anywhere else. Because everybody owns most of the same clipart. |
