Portraits: Idea 1 (Development & Experimentation)

After doing all of my experimentation with different ideas I finally chose to do my first idea. It’s strange how it sometimes works that way (that the first idea is the best) but I am glad that I had done some other ideas and experimentation.

In this illustration I wanted to portray how all of the emotions here belonged to just one person, and I did this by drawing them all by just one line (by not taking my pen off the page).

Here’s my process of bringing this sketch up and adjusting it so that it would be fit for the article:

I first scanned the illustration and brought it up on Photoshop. By duplicating the layer I could then play around with adjusting the brightness & contrast. Once satisfied I then went to Image > Adjustments > Black and White.

I wanted to change the Image Size so that I could work on a larger canvas to get rid of all of the shadows at the edges of the page, so I went onto Image > Image Size and changed the dimensions beneath Document Size.

As it was a bit too big I took the Crop tool and cropped it down to the size I wanted. 

  

I put a white background behind the illustration, and creating a new layer I took the Ellipse tool and drew around the illustration, and inverted it. I then filled in the inverted section with white.

I then went to Gaussian Blur to soften the edges of the ellipse and make it blend into the illustration.

So I get this so far:

I cropped the image once more, duplicated the illustration and went onto Levels to make the black lines darker with the background lighter. I renamed all of the layers to make them easier to work with.

After adjusting my levels I saw that I might not need to use the ellipse, so I hid that layer (as I might use it layer).

I wanted to play around with colour so by just taking a soft brush I experimented with layer styles. Then I decided that the colour kind of took away the focus of the lines, so I hid that layer.

I went back to the ellipse layer to try it out with a colour other than white, so I locked the layer and changed it to yellow. I then unlocked it, went to Gaussian blur, and then changed the colour to grey. 

 Now I have two versions to compare:

I quite like the grey version as it softens the illustration, meaning that it wouldn't burst out from the page but blend into the article nicely.

However I want to try out experimenting with different filters, so I went onto Filter > Filter Gallery to have a little play around.

Ink Outline

Neon Glow - this actually looks pretty cool!

Graphic Pen

Conclusion
I think that despite all of these experiments with filters, I shall stick with my initial ideas of either having it just black and white or with a grey vignette. At least I now know how to use filters!

Now I would need to experiment with my other ideas and then compare them all to see which one would be better suited for New Scientist as I would need to keep my target audience in mind.