Digital Artwork

Before you start saying but PSP doesn;t have Adobe plugins, thats true, but if you install any Adobe PhotoShop demo, you automatically gain access to the plugins in PSP. Details here.

Background:

I've been working on a theme of opressed women, centred around the idea of women in enclosed spaces, the objectification of women leading to "sexuality in a box". This tutorial is based on one of those images.

The sequences below have been heavily shrunk in size to make this tutorial download in a reasonable time. The original image is significantly larger and you may need some patience when working at this level. That said, my main machine is only a 233MHz PC, which is not that over powered these days....

Step 1:

1. This is an original photograph taken from a specific photo shoot
2. In retrospect, I wish that we'd actually built a box for the model to work in, as it is very hard for the model to imagine the square edges of the box. As you can see in the upper hand, the hand is at quite an angle.
3. To correct this, I used the KPT Squizz plugins to reshape that part of the picture. Squizz is OK, but it does tend to blur the image, however, I already had in mind that the image would be heavily manipulated and so I was not overly concerned about this. The image could probably have just as easily been fixed by repainting the hand.

Step 2:

1. The next stage involved painting in the shadows to form the shape of the box.
2. This involved all sorts of shading (using the adjust tool in "darken" mode, a little cloning to lose the horizontal line in the original photo.
3. I use a penpad for this kind of work, it is just way superior to a mouse.

Step 3:

1. Next, in a new layer, I created a shaded area. This was done using several selections, both rectangular and point-to-point freehand. If you hold down the Shift key as you make selections they are added to the previous selection.
2. Once the selection was finished, I filled with black.
3. Then I adjusted the opacity of this new layer (to around 35%) so that it merely provided some shading over the image below.

Step 4:

1. However, when the two layers are viewed together, it is clear that the new shadow also falls over the model, completely ruining the effect of the inside of the box being shaded.
2. So, now I used the rub-out tool to remove the shading from where the model was present, so the shading blends to the background, not overlaying the foreground.
3. Final result looked like this in the shading layer.

Step 5:

1. The first image is the result of the overlaid shading above. I merged this into a single layer. This layer was then Copied (Ctrl-C) and pasted as a new layer (Ctrl-L) directly over the original.
2. This new, top layer was then effected by the Adobe, Sketch, Stamp filter.
3. The Light/Darkness control is turned way down to 1 to make sure I just got fine lines, similarly the Smoothing was taken down to 2 for the same reason.
4. This gave me a second layer that was essentially an outline of the original.
5. Some cleaning up to remove heavier blocks around the top and left of the image (where it was darker to begin with) left me with the layer shown in the centre above.
6. Finally, the top layer is set to "Multiply" mode, so that the layer below is clearly visible. Picture right.

Step 6:

1. The original image, the lower layer, still looked a little too realistic for me, part of a general style I like to push to an almost golden feel.
2. Selecting the image layer, and using RGB adjust I pushed up the Red by 80% and green by 40%. (You can always use a Red/Green push to add a golden tone, works especially well on greyscale images).
3. Showing the two layers again gives the picture on the right.

Step 7:

1. Finally, to frame the image.
2. First I expand the canvas size, and fill with black.
3. In this case I then used Blade Pro to add some texture to the backround. I tried a number of different things including some textures and spray painting before settling on this. The frame needs a little interest, but should not detract from the core image.
4. I could have just left the frame black, but then the "boxed" effect is nothing like as strong.