Project 4: Zac Tile

Getting Started

After opening the Zac Tile file, I doubled the size of my canvas and selected around the outline with the rectangular marquee tool. I then cloned and moved the selection with Ctrl + Alt + Shift and flipped it horizontal with the Free Transform command.  Then I selected the black outlines by loading the channel as a selection (wish I had known that for the last project) and made them a new layer. At this point I made about 10 duplicate images and started experimenting.

Compositions

The first thing I tried with the brush tool was Color Dynamics because it was my favorite from the book assignment.  I tried a variety of diameter, hardness, shape dynamic, and color dynamic settings. I ended up using a brush diameter of 46 pixels with Hue jitter- 92% and  Saturation jitter – 46%. I got the best multicolored effect with red selected for brush color.

For the composition with the white background I moved the brush quickly across the lines to get a thin striped effect.

For the composition with the black background I moved the brush more slowly and single clicked each circle in the frame to get one color per circle.  For the background I left the color dynamic settings active and switched to black.  I then changed to the background layer and filled it in.  This increased the contrast of the colored lines and added texture to the background.

For the fully colored composition, I added the color fill layer and used the custom colors loaded from the file that came with the book. I used the paintbucket tool set to ‘all layers’ with tolerance set to 100, to assure coverage in the corners and other small areas.  In the end I only had to zoom in and fill a few pixels it had missed. I used as many colors as possible (sticking to my multicolored theme) but left the inside of the frame white to contrast the colored circles within it. At the end this picture felt a little flat and I wanted to add some depth.  I experimented with different filters until I found the ‘plastic wrap’ one. It gave me the effect I was looking for, almost like plastic blocks were put together to make the lions face.

Layer Trouble

At some point I messed up the layers so that any green color I selected showed as dark green. I never did figure out why, but it went away once I flattened the image which is why I assume it was related to layers. That wasn’t the only layer related problem I had.  I wanted to make a layer to separate the frame from the face.  I selected the frame, copied it, and went to Layer -- > New -- > Layer via copy.  It created the layer but when I went to paint on it, the paint showed up in the thumbnail but not on my image.  Maybe I should have created a New fill layer? Or maybe it was the layer hierarchy I had wrong.  Not sure.