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.
