Creative interpretations: Football at Auburn University

[Trimoon]

Impressionist Filter and layer Blending

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[DannyRaphael]

Steve... Great use of Impressionist. Your bold work in the BG sets of the FG perfectly.

On this one, I'm dabbling with a watercolor technique...Started with a sketch layer (Smart Blur/Edges only, Inverted, Diffuse > Anisotropic) and used white to paint over the extraneous lines.

Created a History snapshot of this layer (from the History palette menu, create snapshot / current layer), set the history source (clicked box to the left of the newly created snapshot) and with the History Brush tool selected and a small, stipple brush with Fade set to 25%, restored the sketch lines onto a new layer. The intent here was to give the lines more of a freehand sketch look than you get from Smart Blur/Edges only + Anisotropic.

For some color, I duplicated the Background and applied a healthy dose of Dust & Scratches to smoosh the colors a bit and again created a snapshot of this layer via the History palette's Create Snapshot command. Using various brushes with the History Brush (low opacity), I roughed in color onto a new layer. Since the brush opacity was low, you could still see the sketch lines below the color.

To get some stroke contrast and overlap I duplicated the Background again, applied Image > Adjustments > Hue Saturation and cranked up the saturation a bit. Another layer snapshot was taken and a new layer created (blend mode changed from Normal to Darken). Again, using various brushes with the History Brush tool I painted some additional strokes to beef up some of the shadow areas.

According to a book I got the other day this method of laying down a sketch and applying lighter colors first, and overlaying them with darker colors (for shadowed areas) is one way "real" watercolor artists create their art. I'm not completely happy with the (so-called) watercolor strokes, but I can see promise in the overall concept.

~Danny~

[rlspencer1]

Thank you Mike Finn, for your new action at least to me called ValueMap that is in beta. I ran the defaults in the action and did the following after
1. Dry brush 1.8.2
2. Poster Edge 2.1.2
3. Fresco 2.8.1 and added a little noise.
The thing I like most about te action was the background especially the treatment of the two men on either side of the player.
Bob

[CJ Swartz]

Duped original, made typical sketch layer (desaturated-Color Dodge blend-blur to bring back detail), duped that layer and ran graphic pencil (using light blue/bright gold) on bottom of two layers. Used Dry Brush on one or both layers also (sorry, got a bit lost while working - wanted to soften details with Dry Brush and used it a few times "somewhere".) Used Pin Light layer blend and added layer mask to bring out detail in player. Added color/texture layers above to de-emphasize crowd/background.