A playlist for getting to know Elements: various tools, layers, layer masks...
Smart Filters video Tutorail
So, you know your tools, then you can start looking at tutorials that are specific to digital painting.
The guy that does that has a pretty extensive YouTube channel, and this particular playlist has over 100 tutorials for a whole bunch of different things you can do in digital art stuff.
This one is more my own, rather than relying so much on downloaded actions, though there are still elements of Poisoned Peach in there, and Pioneer Woman's "Dim the Lights" really made it pop. But there's a lot of my own touches as well.
Here's the same thing, but I added ShadowHouse's "Difference Maker" texture. I can't decide if I like it better with or without the texture...
Well, it took a few days, after last week's (happy) chaos, but we're hitting our groove again. Everybody's had a cold, so we skipped the Nature Study outside in the cold this week, but otherwise things went really well!
In Phonics this week, we kept working on drilling cvc words. He's getting there. He can do it, it's just soooo S-L-O-W when you have to read every little letter! But, today he surprised me twice by knowing what stuff said, outside our lesson. I'm sure it's just a matter of practice & gaining confidence and experience.
Two weeks ago, Math Expressions called for hexagons and trapezoids. I wasn't paying much attention, and I made octagons for the flannel board, rather than hexagons... and then couldn't keep them straight when I was talking to him. This week when I asked during Math if he wanted to do a Math Monster or a shapes picture, he asked for hexagons. OK! So I made some hexagons and we did flannel board math that day. (We did the monster another day.)
We're well into our Mr. Popper's Penguins Read Aloud now, and Monkey likes it well enough to protest when our chapter is finished, and to ask for seconds at bedtime when we read it at naptime. I'm enjoying it too: this one is pretty funny!
Raven tried something new this week too: we got out the high chair and let him try sitting in there, well padded by blankets, since he's not at all stable yet. It seems to agree with him, and Monkey lost no time at all in showing him the fine art of cooking. Cooking cars into stew. Yum.
I learned some new tricks too. I took all those wedding pictures last week, and this week I discovered batch processing - that is, I set it up, and Photoshop does a whole batch of pictures the same way, without my needing to do more than wind it up and set it loose. Considering that on the day of the wedding I took around 400 pictures, I'm very happy about this discovery! It means that I spend my time doing the fun, artistic stuff, and not the whole rotate the picture so they're not sideways thing. Here's my favorite from this week:
*Pioneer Woman's Define & Sharpen - then removed it from all but the cutie with an oval mask. *Pioneer Woman's Boost - and again with the oval mask. *Flatten.
*Added an orange version of ShadowHouse's "Bosch" texture. Blend mode: Overlay. *Used the Hot Pink Texture Removal technique to remove texture from the cutie, but keep the warming effect from the color of the texture. *Added ShadowHouse's "Soft Grunge" texture, and removed texture from the cutie again, again keeping the color. Blend mode: Multiply. *Flatten. Also saved a copy, because I want to be able to come back to here if I don't like what I'm about to try.
*Added a dark brown solid color fill layer. Masked an oval off the cutie. *Flatten. *Duplicate background, Gaussian Blur:4, Blend Mode: Overlay. Reduce opacity & mask out the cutie a bit. *Flatten. *Pioneer Woman's Quick Edge Burn. Change it to a forest green, blend mode to darken.
*Hunt for that homeschool catalog because I think it's got a bit of poetic stuff that might go well with the picture. Can't find it. Search for different text.
Actions from Pioneer Woman. (Tweaked & masked a bit) Clipping mask from CoffeeShop. Background texture from Shadowhouse. And, of course, beautiful picture from Fix-it Friday's contributors.
The theme this week for I Heart Faces is "play." Monkey was having a good time playing with the chopsticks and incidentally eating a few noodles, and I was having a blast playing with my camera. Good times, all around.
I had a number of "firsts" with this picture: my first attempt at editing in RAW - that's definitely something that I'm going to have to play with some more, as soon as I convince my camera to do it. It was also my first serious exploration of brushes, and this is also something that I'm going to have to play some more with. For all those "firsts" I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out: normally I don't expect much at all from a "first," but this I'm relatively happy with. Downright pleased, for a First. Even if it is slightly out of season, now that I'm finished with it.
I used this tutorial to learn how to do the polaroid effect, and it was surprisingly easy. The picture is from a trip we took last summer to go to my brother's wedding.
Here is the original picture of today's Pretty Lady:
*Curves adjustment, to brighten things up a bit. *Vibrance adjustment, increasing both vibrance and saturation. *Pioneer Woman's "Boost," then turned down the "zip." This is one that I used all the time. I should figure out what she's done to make this action, as this is one I haven't done that with yet. *Flatten *Spot healing brush on the Pretty Lady's forehead, just a little. *Smoothed out skin tones, just a bit. I used the dropper to guess what skintones she ought to have, then a soft brush at 7%, then toned down the whole thing with an opacity adjustment, because I always loose depth when I do this. Wished I could see the Pretty Lady in person, so I would know what she really looks like; that always makes this part so much easier! *Flatten again. *Pioneer Woman's "Define and Sharpen." This is another favorite that I need to figure out what she's done to make it work so nicely! *Pioneer Woman's "Bring on the Eyes" at about 22%, but the Pretty Lady's eyes are brown, and it doesn't seem to do much for her eyes, though the whites of her eyes benefit. I'm thinking that I've seen a thing for brown eyes somewhere... *Ah, yes, it was on I Heart Faces. I used the Julie Rivera method from this tutorial. I love tutorials.
At this point, Pretty Lady looks like this:
I like it, but all that lovely background is begging me to play around with some texture stuff; see if I can get it "right" today. Whatever "right" is.
I put in Old Paper 2, from ShadowHouse Creations, changed the blending mode to soft light, then used the "hot pink technique" from the video at the bottom of the post to get the texture, but not the warm color of the texture, off her face. The hot pink thing is around 5:30 in the video, but the whole thing is great. I like it, but I think that for once my texture is more subtle than I like, so I'm going to try adding another one. I picked "bosch," again from ShadowHouse, decreased the saturation till it was B&W, since I didn't think that I needed any more color added, copied, stretched it so it fit the picture with the darker sections going vertically on the barn walls, and changed the blend mode to hard light. The effect was cool on the barn, but not cool on the Pretty Lady, so I added a layer mask. Thinking of how Dana Suggs (contributor #3) made the Pretty Lady pop so nicely from her background, I tried for a similar effect, by masking out her face & shoulders at 100%, then decreasing the opacity of my brush until it was at about 30% when I did her hands. Then, to sort of blend it all together, I did a Gaussian blur on the mask, which got rid of the edges for me. Then, I turned the opacity on the texture down to about 70% and flattened.
Hurray!! I actually like this one! I think this is the first time that I've been happy with a textured picture that I did!
Because it's fun to look at the pictures side-by-side, here they are:
I don't have specifics for what I did with this one. Pioneer Woman's Boost, and I think her Define and Sharpen as well. Some adjustment layers that I can't remember anymore. The Album Cafe's Dreamy Soft Diffusion. More tweaking. I don't know exactly what I did. But I like it.
I started with #1, and played around with a lot of different ways of taking this black and white. It's desaturated, and the vibrance turned way down. I fooled around with a threashold layer, and different blending options. Then, when I was done fiddling and experimenting (and deleting, and reverting, and plain old reloading), I ran CoffeeShop's Moody Pop. I'm not terribly happy with this one. Definitely still need some practice on the whole black & white thing.
Coffeeshop has this cool "Diptych" storyboard action. I tried it out on some pictures from a couple years ago, and I'm so pleased with how it turned out! I'm thinking that this pair will be going in my scrapbook, hopefully in the next couple of days. I'm working on May 2007, and it would please me if I got to a time that seemed less like "a long time ago!"
