bitsofbobs

Been getting some questions of late as to my preferred doodle method so thought i’d share. Lots of people do things differently but I thought I’d outline my process it’s always good to share even if someone knows a better more efficient way. So i’ll Attempt to walk you through as best I can to get you to this…

I like to do all my drawing on paper, pencil first then use pen. My preferred pens are these mitsubishi uni pin fine liners, they’re real quick drying, come in loads of line weights, last for ages and are waterproof. Once the piece is finished it’s onto the scanner. Make sure the scanner is clear of any dust or fluff same goes for the drawing if you’ve used a rubber make sure all the wee bits have gone. First off My names rob johnson and I’m a PC but i’ll show the directory as well as the PC shortcuts. I do all my scanning through Photoshop which can be found File>Import >Twain…blah blah blah and the name of your scanner. Once it’s fired up I generally scan the piece in colour and at 300 dpi you can have higher if it’s for print but mine is just for general digital use. Once you have the Jpg into Photoshop the first thing to do is desaturate the image, this will remove all the colour turning it to black and white. You can use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U or in the menu Image>Adjustmens>Desaturate. Now what we need to do is sort the image to try remove some of the other noise around it to get a good solid line. To do this we’ll adjust the levels, this can be done by pressing Ctrl+L which brings up this window…

You’ll see that the levels window has three arrows pointing up just below the graph a black on the left, grey in the middle and a white on the far right. As a general rule you move the black arrow to the right to the highest nearest peak & the white into the left until you reach the first part of the graph. The midtones are controlled with the grey arrow in the middle this will be where you will see the big difference. Move it too far right you’ll see alot of mess, move it too far left it will wash it all out. So you’ll have to find a happy medium. Once you’re happy with the levels, ok that and next open up the brightness & contrast Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast… here you’ll probably want to increase the Brightness and The Contrast which should leave you with a nice clean line. It will take a bit of playing around with but generally if you’re going to play about with the levels & brightness try and get them right first time as if you do it over and over again information does get lost in the process.

Now comes the clever bit, separating the line from the white background. You’ll see in your layers window (F7 If you can’t see it or Windows>Layers) there only is one layer. Select all Ctrl+A or Select>All this will put a little dotted line around the whole image. Now copy the image Ctrl+C or Edit>Copy. Now find your Channels window if its not open you can switch it on here Windows>Channels this will have 4 layers in it RGB, Red, Green and Blue what you need to do is add a new layer to this which can be found at the bottom of the window just left of the bin…

This adds an alpha Channel. By default this will switch off all the other layers, then you paste Ctrl+P or Edit>Paste. This will paste your whole image in and make it look no different. Now With the Ctrl button held down left click the layer you pasted into. This will highlight the lines selected…

Now we have the lines selected switch off your alpha layer (the little eye to the left) and switch on the other 4 RGB, Red…etc return to your Layers window F7 or Windows>Layers here create a new layer Ctrl+Shift+N or using the little icon left of the bin switch off all the other layers. All you should see now is the selction over a chequed background…

What we need to do now is fill this selection, however before we do that we need to invert the selection, to do this press Ctrl+Shift+I or Select>Inverse , the selection will still look the same. Now select A colour And fill the selection with the paint bucket over in the tools or just press G. When you fill the selection you should now have just the lines on a transparent background…

We’ve done it…woohoo! all that’s left to do is add couple of layers underneath the lines layer and colour them in whatever colour you want…bosh…

I hope this was useful to someone, It may be basic to some and others may do the same thing differently, have fun & Goodluck.

Little doodle I did on the train then taken into photoshop where I added colour. Everybody loves robots, but for all they look cool I’ve yet to find anything robotic that serves a purpose (for just around the house…not the big useful industrial ones).

Does anyone own a useful robot?

Bigger one here.

Last night my attention was brought to the fact there was going to be the annual (apparently) persied meteor shower. about 9 o’clock I noticed it was a pretty clear night. It was decided. Nic was up for it, more to do with driving her new mini more than anything. So we headed to Balmaha beach about 1130 and sat with a picnic blanket (tartan of course) on the banks of loch lomond. Managed to get a few photos…which once looked at were actually black. Wasn’t until I got them into photoshop and did some trickery the image came to light. There was a bit of cloud but you could still see shooting stars through them. I loved it. Seen loads. dunno where they got this magic “100″ meteors in an hour nonsense though. Unless I went to bed too early

Fun and games with some photoshop, was stumbling around when I came across this photoshop technique. Not really that convinced about it to be honest but it’s good if you dabble with photoshop but never really go off the beaten track. It’s based on Lomography which is basically a cheap, pretty crap russian made camera which sprung up in the 80′s. It got a bit of a cult following because the pictures it took were so over saturated and distinct. Have a look round flickr there’s some pretty cool stuff. You can still buy lomo cameras they’re pretty cheap I might have to invest…but in the time being have a go in photoshop. Also have a rummage round their site …pretty cool

Well Another good weekend of out outdoors photography type shenanigans. With macca this time going for a wee walk round the Glasgow necropolis…the place was dead…sorry. Poor taste. Some amazing photo opportunities. Although it did feel a bit strange just hanging around graveyards taking pictures…with your mates. Bee wanting to try this technique for a while now though. It’s called tilt shift. Basically it’s taking a normal picture with alot of depth, then removing the depth to one focal point to make it look like a tiny model. Genius. This was just a quick test…much better ones on Flickr…also some real bad ones too