Working with Public Domain Photos

This one was a 15-minute project. In fact it was more like a 10-minute project. I wanted to make an illustration to go with Pete Armetta's short fiction "Gypsy Hill" in the Piker Press.

I found a public domain pic of a park online, cropped it to pare it down to the elements and the dimensions I wanted, and used the clone tool to make certain elements disappear. Can't find them, can you? In Photoshop, jarring objects can become invisible!

From Image--> Adjustments--> Saturation, I saturated the colors a little, making them more vivid, then darkened the pic a little. With Filters, I used Artistic--> Paint Daubs. Voila!

 There was a time that I sneered at "flash fiction," but I find that Pete Armetta's short-shorts can inspire some arty effort in me. He's made me a believer in tiny snippets of writing.

Luggage

This was the cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "Castaways."

I wanted something vivid, but simple, and opted for a rough sketch in pastels, on black construction paper. As noted in previous posts, such sketches don't scan well, or even photograph well. What the eye sees doesn't correspond with the camera's lens.

I scanned the pic, then used Photoshop to super-saturate the colors. The I used "adjustments" to enhance the blacks. Luminous!

The red is for balance and deception. In Part Two of the story the following week, I left this image for Tyler as a treat:

The Obvious Slacker

I've been slacking, I know.

There are days when I work on stuff, and days when I don't. And the days all run together sometimes, and I can't remember which day I did what.

I know that this was the cover image for the March 30th issue of the Piker Press. It was kind of fun, building layer upon layer, but I really wished I had one of those illustrator's pads that has a stylus and allows one to use Photoshop a little more accurately.

Still, it wasn't bad.