Calaca Cover

I was working on a cover for the Press, for a story called "Boss."

It being the Press' November theme, Mes de los Muertos, I chose to make the cover image a calaca, a skeleton mimicking a real person.

Using black construction paper, I began

 construction with a light blue pastel pencil, then added some interesting colors. Naples yellow, a purple, a dark blue.

The picture was too dull.

I added a bold bright blue, a cerise, an orange, a neon green, but though it was closer to what I had seen in my mind's eye, it was not enough.

Hovering above the sketch on a footstool with my digital camera, I became well aware once again that light applied to black paper produces a shitty result. So I took what I had and transferred the picture to my computer, and opened the file in Photoshop.

I selected the background black, and washed over that with real black. Using the "Magic Wand" tool, I got the rest of the blacks and made them real black.

Then I selected "Adjustments" and "Saturation" and amped up the colors. Yeah. That was what I was looking for, and in the end, got the image I was trying to achieve.

P. S. I have to say that whatever it is that Google is doing with their settings is really total suckation. It used to be so easy to upload multiple pictures, and now it's a major pain in the butt. this post looks little like what I tried to upload.