Caricature

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Another of the many caricatures that I have on my 'drawing board' at the moment, is it Christmas time or something? LOL!

My process to produce these is fairly simple:

I put up the pictures of the subject on my computer in photoshop and then have paper and pencil to hand to draw the rough sketch.

Once that is done and I am happy with how it has turned out, I then scan in the sketch via my Canon LiDe 90 scanner via photoshop 'import' command. I scan in colour mode at 100 dpi. I just need the 'rough' so I can then make the next step:

The scan is now in photoshop and I open a new file that will become the finished artwork. This is set at A4 with 300dpi RGB.

I can then drag the rough scan directly into the new file I have created and photoshop puts it on a new later.

I alter the opacity of that layer to around 42% so it is a light grey.

I then add a new layer ontop of the scan layer and then draw the linework using the scan layer as a guide. At this stage I can modify my drawing if I feel it needs any tweaking.

Once the linework is complete I delete the scan layer as it is no longer required.

Now I have the base 'locked' layer and the linework layer on top of that.

So next I create a layer ontop of the base layer but under the linework layer and this is my 'colour' layer where I add colour of course!

As I go through the colour or 'painting' as you could call it, I may add a new layer ontop to paint shadows and the reason for that is to allow greater control over how the shadows will 'look', for example if I think they are too strong I can lower the opacity of the layer to give softer shadows, and so on.....

Once I have started this process I will of course save the file as a psd file so my work is not lost!

Then once it is finished, I flatten all layers and then save the file as a jpg, remember it is at 300dpi so it will print out really good!

I can then also change the image size to create a smaller on screen size, like 500 x 750 pixels and this allows easy and fast uploading to the web.

Thats about it! Drop me a line if you have any questions!