Photoshop Edit

Improving My Design 

Once I figured out my initial design I decided to scan it into the computer and edit a bit in Photoshop to give me an idea of how I could work with it. Opening up the design I decided to redraw all the line work so that it was clean and neat to design the GIF with later. Since I never work on the background layer that Photoshop opens up with (This gives you huge restrictions) I duplicated the layer and used the paint bucket tool to paint the layer white. This gave me something to work on when drawing the lines since I would later then lower the opacity on the imported picture I drew on paper.

 After I made a background, I created a new layer for my outline work to go on. Clicking on the layer that had the photo of my drawing on, I lowered the opacity so that when drawing the outline I could see my work more clearly. Changing back to the outline layer, I switched to the hard edge brush tool and began to draw the outline of my character. 

Since I always keep my canvas rather huge, this gives me the freedom to roughly sketch something out and it not lose its quality. Once I had something down I nearly finished the initial outline of the character before I realised that something wasn’t right and I just wasn’t pleased with the overall design. After much observation I realised that the top of the head didn’t go right and it resembled something that wasn’t intended for my final design. 

It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with it, it didn’t seemed balanced and was lopsided. The design itself had too much going on with one side of the head that it looked like it was being dragged down and I felt like it didn’t really go. After redrawing it I adjusted where his hair fell and added a somewhat crown feature into the upper left side of his head. This would be somewhere I could later put in something that I thought about earlier on in the development process and gave me more time to think of how I would do it. 

Once I finished my final outline of my gif, I then began to think about how I would have liked it to look once it was all finished. I had done this because I wanted to think about also how I would animate this into a GIF.

Deleting my photo reference layer since I didn’t need it anymore I created a new layer and began to put in basic colour shades for my alien. Since I mostly always use the hard edge brush tool, I started with one colour and coloured in his face and body. I done all this on a multiply later so the line work underneath was still seen. I then chosen a darker colour and looked to see where the shadow would fall, going into more depth I darkened the areas where I saw fit. Then after I had finished I picked a lighter colour than the base colour and gave my alien some simple highlights. I didn’t want to go into too much depth with the detail as I wanted to keep the style somewhat like a cartoon but still to be in depth to hold expression. 

Since my alien didn’t have any background colour and was just sitting on a white layer, I decided to do the background next so that the colours on the alien would stand out more. Just using a slightly darker colour that the alien himself I went round the edges and darkened them, giving the look that there was a slight foggy atmosphere around him. 

When I was creating my design I had the whole idea of him being magical and that fireflies would follow him everywhere he goes. That he would radiate light from orbs that was attached to him. This being said when I coloured him in, I didn’t do any of this and I was slightly let down and I was still committed to create that effect. So on a new layer I used a very bright blue colour, this was going to be the colour of the orbs on his head. Using the hard edge brush I placed a simple round circle on the layer, this would be the centre of the orb. I then grabbed the soft edge brush and began to create an ambient light around the orb. As it came together I still wasn’t happy with how dull the light was so I quickly used the dodge tool to brighten the saturation of the colour. This now looked like the orb was glowing and I was happy with the result. 

Given that I had done the orbs before it was easy for me to do the fireflies since I had previously did the effect on the orbs. Changing the colour to yellow I was able to mimic the same effect as the orbs from the previous layer. I had finished and all I had to do was go over last minute touch ups such as changing the highlight light from where the fireflies hit the right side of the body and how the blue orb hit the left side of the body. After I had finished I saved the file after flattening the layer and realised later on how much of a huge mistake this was.