Nevermore
10-19-2006, 01:05 AM
No exclamation marks or catchy subject caption. Graybonnie asked me how I coloured in clip art and since it is not exactly rocket science, I can't squawk too loud. Hoping others chime in with their favorite techniques. I have two that I use a lot:
1. For black and white clip art, I get rid of either the black or the white so that I have black/transparent or white/transparent. I use lock transparency to keep my colouring "in" the lines. Or on the lines. It all depends on what you select. If that is clear as mud I will be happy to explain further. But lock transparency keeps the clear pixels clear so that your colouring can only effect the black or white lines. If you want to colour the spaces instead of the lines, make the spaces the black or white and have the lines be transparent. As I said, if anyone wants a fuller explaination, I will be happy to provide it. Will stop twittering now.
2. For coloured clip art, I use the colour replacement brush mostly on colour blend mode (the default option when you choose this tool) set to sample once. This is rather funky and has to be babied and coddled quite a bit. Colour blend does not, of course, necessarily give you the colour of the swatch you have chosen so experimentation is needed. By choosing sample once you get a lot of control over where the colour is placed but it can be frustrating and you might have to keep clicking (sampling) to apply. Depends on your eyesight too! But the neat-o thing is that PS samples where you want to apply the colour and will do so but won't paint over an adjacent space that it perceives as a different sample colour. So it is easy to stay in the lines (take easy with a grain of salt!).
I used to do a lot of mask extracting as a kind of zen thing to do: painstaking, detailed work that put my mind into a kind of whitespace but lately I have taken to colouring instead.
1. For black and white clip art, I get rid of either the black or the white so that I have black/transparent or white/transparent. I use lock transparency to keep my colouring "in" the lines. Or on the lines. It all depends on what you select. If that is clear as mud I will be happy to explain further. But lock transparency keeps the clear pixels clear so that your colouring can only effect the black or white lines. If you want to colour the spaces instead of the lines, make the spaces the black or white and have the lines be transparent. As I said, if anyone wants a fuller explaination, I will be happy to provide it. Will stop twittering now.
2. For coloured clip art, I use the colour replacement brush mostly on colour blend mode (the default option when you choose this tool) set to sample once. This is rather funky and has to be babied and coddled quite a bit. Colour blend does not, of course, necessarily give you the colour of the swatch you have chosen so experimentation is needed. By choosing sample once you get a lot of control over where the colour is placed but it can be frustrating and you might have to keep clicking (sampling) to apply. Depends on your eyesight too! But the neat-o thing is that PS samples where you want to apply the colour and will do so but won't paint over an adjacent space that it perceives as a different sample colour. So it is easy to stay in the lines (take easy with a grain of salt!).
I used to do a lot of mask extracting as a kind of zen thing to do: painstaking, detailed work that put my mind into a kind of whitespace but lately I have taken to colouring instead.