Tutorial 05 - Zakuro (Full Tut)
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Program Used: Paint Shop Pro 9
Translatable? Yes, provided you can figure out your programs' equivalents of tools (Push Brush) and the ways I use to get to things (such as "Layers: New Adjustment Layer: Hue/Saturation/Lightness".)
First take your starting image, and erase everything around your character. I chose Zakuro from Tokyo Mew Mew (and had to redraw her bottom half - used the Push Brush (also see here). Didn't pay too much attention to getting the lines perfect because I knew I would be resizing it).
Your image will need an outer glow. What I did was after I erased the background, I promoted Zakuro to her own layer, Raster One, and then made a second layer underneath her and filled it with white. I selected Zakuro's layer again, and use the Magic Wand to select all the empty space, then inverted so Zakuro was selected (Selections:Invert). Keeping that area still selected, I went back to my bottom white layer. Then I went Selections: Modify: Expand and set that to 4, then got the glow by going Selections: Modify: Feather and setting that to 10. Merge them by going Layers: Merge Visible, copied my picture, and then pasted it as a new image (I work better with a "clean slate").
Now, onto the good stuff. I resized Zakuro so that I could fit almost all of her into a 100x100 icon, cropped (the usual stuff that no one cares about because it's obvious but I feel obligated to mention anyway), and sharpened. Then I made a new Hue/Saturation Layer (Layers: New Adjustment Layer: Hue/Saturation/Lightness) and set the saturation to 43.
After that, a new Levels Channel Mixer Layer (Layers: New Adjustment Layer: Channel Mixer). My settings were:
Red: Red: 116, Green 3, Blue: -8
Green: Red: 0 Green: 103, Blue: -1
Blue: Red: 0, Green: 0, Blue: 100
And the "Constant" for all those was ZERO.
Now, the last of these funky layers is a new Levels Adjustment Layer. (Layers: New Adjustment Layer: Levels...Are you people noticing a trend yet?)
RBG: Input Levels (left-to-right): 0, 1, 255 Output Levels: (left-to-right): 0, 255
Red: Input Levels (left-to-right, like the rest...): 0, 1, 194 Output Levels:0, 255
Green: Input Levels: 0, 1, 255 Output Levels: 0, 255
Blue: Input Levels: 0, 1.2, 255 Output Levels: 0, 255
Now we should have something with pretty colors like this:
Now that the prettyful coloring is done, we need a background. I searched through my hard drive to find a suitable background texture. Because Zakuro is color-coded purple, I found a nice, purple-ish texture (by unknown. Though it does have the word "Dec17" in its name, so I wonder if that means something?)
Pasted Zakuro as a new layer.
->
I decided that the texture was a bit too dull, so I duplicated my base-layer-texture and set that to overlay If your texture works, you might not wanna mess around with it.
It still looked too dull for brightly-colored Zakuro, so I took another texture (by unknown) and set it above the copy of my base texture(right below the picture of Zakuro)
To make it brighter, I then adjusted the saturation up to 71 (Adjust: Hue and Saturation: Hue/Saturation) and set it to soft light.
Now, for the text. I rotated my entire icon counterclockwise 90 degrees, and went in search of a nice script-y font. I settled on Carpenter ICG at size 24. Using white, I upped the stroke width to "3.0" and kept the text bold, and typed "goodbye". Then I found a nice purple/pink/reddish color from the image and retyped "goodbye on another new layer, this time setting the stroke width to "0.5." and retyped the text.
After arranging the purple-pink text over the white, I gaussian blurred the white layer (set it to 1) and rotated my image back 90 degrees. Viola! Add a 1-pixel border under the Zakuro-image layer, and I'm done!
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