Tutorial part 2 - the making of a Wally cover

In the first part of this tutorial, I painted the little dawg. This next bit is the scary bit. The first time I decided to do this, I did think I was about to ruin a perfectly good painting that had taken me some time to do. I can't even remember what made me do it, but I found myself, scalpel in hand, cutting around a character. Happily, it all ended well, and I have been working like this ever since.

Take your sharp scalpel, with a new blade in it (I use a 10A) and cut! I left a few mm around the dog.

 

Scan in and Edit - Place on your photoshop document. 

If you look in the Layer menu, you will see there is a 'levels' option. You can move the arrows up and down to bring your character into focus with the background easier to erase. (Thanks @BeckaMoor, I was listening!)

 Then choose the 'magic eraser' tool from the side bar on the left. You will probably be flashed up with a warning sign that Smart Objects need to be Rasterized, but just press ok.

You can see here on the pic above and below that with the magic eraser, it doesn't get everything. But I use that to my advantage as I like it to look like a layer, not an element of a whole picture. It gives the image a more 3d appearance. The leg I've circled in blue I need to erase a bit more as it looks a bit scruffy, but the red circle I left almost as it was.

 I already had worked on the front cover graphic elements, so I just used Edit - Place to put him in the right spot. As you can see, his legs are sticking out the bottom of the circle, so making sure I chose the right layer, I carefully erased them.

 Here's the finished piece.

Thanks for looking at my blog. 

For further details of my other work, you can visit

www.scarlettinc.co.uk

Tutorial part 1 - the painting of a Wally

For those of you who are interested, I thought I would show how I went about painting and creating one of my Wallys from the book I'm working on at the moment, Wally & Bert BFF's.

I start with drawing the layout of the page on thin Layout paper, then trace through onto watercolour paper just one of the elements, in this case, Wally. The pic on the left is a colour rough and if you look carefully, you can see the light pencil drawing on the right.

With my Staedler water resistant black pens, I draw the outline of the character. In this instance I have used a thicker pen for most of in, with some thinner for details.

When I'm sure it's dry I rub out the pencil lines and load clean water onto the area I'm about to paint.

Flying in the face of all I was taught at school, I like to mix my paint on the paper, although I do have a rough idea of what colour I want to end up with. So in this case I have loaded some W&N bright red artists watercolour watered down only a touch.

 

And then I chase it around the paper! You never know what is going to happen as watercolour tends to have a mind of it's own (and a close relationship with the laws of physics!)

I like to add water and literally sit there watching paint dry. I remove areas with my wet brush for the highlights and add more paint to the edges and more often than not splodge drops of water onto large areas to give texture. Although it looks like he has a fatal case of smallpox, I know it will look different when dry.

While the head is still wet, I have added some W&N Brown Madder to the area around his eye and ear tip...

and some Vandyke brown. I keep going until I'm happy.

And here he is with his lower half attended to and he's now mostly dry. The intentional (ahem) mistake I made was to forget the waistcoat texture, so I did that after he dried and before I started to colour it.

I love sparkly stuff, so for the waistcoat I used Daler Rowney Pearlescent Liquid Acrylic, Macaw Green, a little splash of pinky red for the bone. As you can see, the 'smallpox' effect has disappeared and he's now ready for the next stage, which will be in part 2.