Illustration Friday - Legendary: How

Someone expressed interest in how I did the Orion piece... and since I usually do stop and save along the way, and throw up the various images- Why not!

I started off with Line Drawings on paper, for each element. Orion, the 2 dogs and Taurus. Once I had a feel for how I wanted them to look, I usually would scan them and trace them with a brush in photoshop. (I have a tablet, makes it easy!) However; my scanner decided to stop working.. so for this one, I laid the line drawings down on the tablet, and traced them that way! It made for some interesting gaps in the artwork.

Anyway, once I had the basic gist of the image into photoshop, I went in and filled out the lines. That gave me something like this:



However, that's not a very smooth looking image. So, next step was to go in and clean up the lines. Oh, by the way, I did the line drawings on a separate layer from the background so that they had a transparent background. Anyhow! Once the lines were cleaned up, it looked something like this:



Once all 4 elements were completed, I started playing around with their placement. I had an idea of how I wanted it to look, but you know how getting things -precisely- in the right spot can be!



Each element had its own "Color" layer beneath the line work, where I blocked in solid colors. Surprisingly enough, Taurus and one of the dogs were originally red and the second dog was shades of gold and brown. And, well- you can see the colors Orion was!

I ended up setting the 3 Animal's Color Layers to a lower transparency, and their layer blending mode to Luminousity. Orion's layer also got it's opacity lowered, but not by nearly as much as the animals.

For the line work itself, I selected each layer and hit "lock transparent pixels" and then went at them with a white brush, then slowly added shades of gray with a low transparency black brush.

The bigger, glowing stars were on their own layers, with some different blending mode options. I played around with inner and out glow and shadows until I had a look I liked. The stars in the background were on still another layer, without any special effects. Just a good swipe with the blur tool!

Anyway, that's the basics of it! Hope that sates the interest of some folks, if you have more questions feel free to ask!