Studio Practice: Photoshop Workshop 2

This week we were looking at ways of adding colour to the black and white drawings we scanned in and edited last week. I opened up my black and white images from last week and changed the mode of the image to 'RGB Colour'.

Brush tool: use a harder brush for strong edges and a softer brush for blending.

I used the brush tool to colour over the woman's coat and then changed the opacity of the colour so that the lines and tones underneath were visible.

Setting up a new layer specifically for colour meant I wasn't drawing directly onto my image so I could always revert back to the original if I wanted to. I set the layer to 'Multiply' which means that the colour applied affects white and grey spaces anything black will still show through. This is a better way of applying colour than the method shown above.

Colour applied using brush on multiply layer

I also used shapes to apply colour using the shape selection tool - here are examples using numerous connected rectangles on the left and one circle for the head on the right. After drawing one shape, you can add, subtract and intercept the shape to fill a more complex area, and then use the brush tool to fill in the area.

These two pictures show how I have applied colour using shapes as well as the brush tool.

Selection tool: The selection tool allows you to select a certain area and create a boundary around it which means whatever you do next will only affect this part of the image.

The different variations of this tool include:

Lasso tool: free drawing
Polygonal: a dot-to-dot style tool connecting each point with a straight line
Magnetic: the tool picks up existing lines and sticks to them.

I have used the magnetic selection tool to follow the outline of the coat and shopping bag and then fill in the area with colour. This is a much quicker way of selecting a neat area within the lines as most of the work is already done for you. I used a small brush to add a bit of detail to the shopping bag in a darker shade of yellow.

I used the brush tool to apply colour to the face and then did the same with the hair but with a lower opacity. This meant that I could draw over some of the same areas of the hair to make them darker which I think has been effective because hair never usually appears to be all one colour. The opacity of this brush meant that when it overlapped the skin colour, it unintentionally formed a shadow.

Using the brush tool to fill in the face colour meant that not all of the colour was within the lines - to solve this I selected a small, hard brush with white as the colour to neaten up the outside edges.

I used the magnetic selection tool to select the skirt, filled it with purple and then used a range of brush sizes in darker shades of purple and low opacity white to make stripes to represent the shadows the pleats in the skirt make.

I was experimenting with the more textured brushes in the image on the right to try and show the texture of the ground. However, I feel this makes the image too heavy at the bottom so I prefer the image on the left as the shadow is also clearer.

This is some more experimentation with textured brushes - I don't particularly like this image as it is very dark and grey, but it started me thinking about working with the background as well as filling in the shape of the body. To do this, I used the quick selection tool to select the background and then the lasso tool to deselect and unwanted information. This meant that my brushwork would only be applied to the background.

Further experimentation with background

I used a large brush to create these patterns and then played around with the levels to produce different variations.

Textures

I scanned in a patterned paper bag because I wanted to use this as the pattern on the lady's coat. I used the 'place embedded' option on a new layer to import the image and then selected 'Edit > Free Transform' to move the image around and scale it.

Multiply - texture on light areas.

Overlay - texture on dark areas.

Smart objects - Layer > Rasterise (this allows you to make changes to the scanned texture.

I used a combination of selection tools to select everything other than the coat and then pressed backspace to delete this, leaving the coat as the only part with the pattern on it.

I then spent some time just exploring the different options.