Dusty step-by-step

OK. The word is out. I let it slip that my last two postings of my dog were not completely done by hand. I did use Photoshop for the final stages of the drawing. A few folks have expressed interest in how it was done, so here we go...


STEP ONE:The drawing.
I did this the traditional way, just me, a pencil and my sketchbook.


STEP TWO: The background
I found a piece of craft paper and crumpled it into a ball. Then I smoothed it back out (kind of) and scanned it into Photoshop.


STEP THREE: Opacity change
Once I scanned the paper, I put it on a separate layer. I changed the opacity of the crumpled paper layer to 30% so it would be very light.




STEP FOUR: Scan the drawing
I scanned it at 150 dpi and brought it into Photoshop. I did a select all, copied and pasted it into the document with the crumpled paper.



STEP FIVE: Changing the layer mode
So now the sketch of dusty is sitting on a layer above the crumpled paper. But I want to be able to see through it to the paper below. One way to do this is to change the proporties of the layer. Click on the pulldown menu in the layers pallet and you'll see all kinds of good stuff in there. Selecting Multiply makes all the "white" pixels transparent but keeps the dark pixels visible.



STEP SIX: Now it's transparent



STEP SEVEN: Adding white
The first thing to do is add a layer so that we have a place to put the white we're about to add. Go to the layers pallet and click on the little icon at the bottom that looks like a page.


Next, click on the Polygon selection tool from the tool box.



Then It's just a matter of making selections with this tool where we want to add white. To make additional selections just hold down the shift key.


Now the fun part...feathering. In Photoshop once a selection has been made, you can give it a soft edge by feathering it. This command is found under the selection menu. In this case I feathered the selection by 20 pixels. The greater the number, the softer the edge you will get.


Here you can see how the selection has become much rounder:


Now that the selection has been made we need to fill it with white. The firs thing to do is make sure the foreground color in the toolbox is set to white. To do so, click on it and it will open the color picker. Click on white and then click OK.


Then go to the Edit menu, come down to fill and you will see this dialog box:


And viola! We now have highlights on the puppy.


I hope this was useful. If you have any question please feel free to leave a comment.