Sketching Guinea Pigs?

One rainy day recently I was looking through my photos when I came across this one of my cousin, Brian.

I´m sure it must be a studio photo and for some reason the photographer gave it a slightly faded vintage look. I thought it would make a lovely pencil sketch, in fact the ideal photo to use to test a sketching action I´d been playing with. 

As usual, one thing led to another and I finally ended up with not just one but two actions, one entirely automatic and the other requiring some individual input. One worked best with landscapes and the other with portraits though both required a little tweaking. Again, as usual, I had to go – at least! - one step further. I thought that some of the resultant sketches would look good with a little colour and I found the easiest way to do this was to make a sketch into a brush which would give it the necessary transparency. After that I created a new layer beneath it and used a soft brush with a fairly low opacity to transform it into a water colour. Using this method it was easy to delete any colour which went over the lines of the sketch. In fact it was almost exactly like digitally painting by numbers with the added advantage that you don´t need a steady hand when applying the colour as it can easily be edited. I think it turned out quite well but you can judge for yourself.

I´ll probably be selling these 2 actions in the store sometime, both for PU and CU, but if you´d like to have them as freebies you can....though with some strings attached because what I really need is at least one tester. I´d need you to try the actions out and send me a couple or three of your sketches telling me which version of PS you used and what, if any, editing you did. Anyone not known to me already can find my email address HERE, otherwise just make your request below. By the way, the actions don´t work well on PSCS2 so I don´t need anyone to test them on that version.

Any guinea pigs?

PS No pun intended though some action is definitely involved here! Dotty Dora Dog has made a remarkably quick recovery after her knee op. The stitches came out a while ago and have left hardly a trace and now that her hair is beginning to grow back again it´s as if it had all been a bad dream. As I said in a previous post, she started doing her doggy aerobics incredibly quickly and, if possible, with even more enthusiasm than before. I´ll be lounging in the garden reading when she´ll zing past me like a bumble bee on elastic, throw herself onto her back on the lawn kicking ecstatically then buzz back again to repeat the performance an hour later. All´s well that ends well.