Assignment 2 - Master Study
This week, the assignment was to do a master study of an existing piece of work. The professor gave use twenty different works of art to choose from and I chose “The Cats of Ulthar” by Abigail Larson.
I had a lot of fun with this project! I found the lineart tracing and coloring very relaxing. My process for recreating this image by Abigail Larson was to first do all the lineart with the mechanical pencil brush (with pressure sensitivity turned on so I could get variable width lines) with a VERY small brush size; about 3 pixels. I made each major section of the lineart on a different layer so I could easily adjust them if needed. For the white cat and the leaves, I turned on the transparency lock after I finished the lineart in black and changed the color to match the original colors. After I had the lineart finished, I blocked out each color by making a fill layer of the color and then using an alpha to paint in where the color should go (this part was very much like coloring in a coloring book!). I used the Flat color brush with variable opacity turned off to paint the alpha channels. When I was happy with the color, I duplicated the color group, flattened it, and set the layer to Overlay. To get the watercolor texture I made a new watercolor layer beneath the color layer and painted the texture in grey using the Fractal Wash brush, Real Dirty water brush (color shifting turned off), and a little of the Real wet sponge.
I had two frustrations while working on this project. First, the lineart on this artwork is so fine that they looked really choppy while I was zoomed in and tracing the original. It made it a bit hard to control the line weight. Secondly, I needed very specific brush settings for some of the applications I was using them for but I found it rather difficult to find where to change those attributes. It took me a long time to find where to change each attribute, but, once I did, I didn't have any further problems.
Original Piece by Abigail Larson
