Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Nazis and the Schlock cover: Part 2

A quick recap, if one was ever needed - I got to do a cover for online pulp anthology Schlock. In the first post in this series of sorts, I chronicled how the linework was brought about, a post you can read here

So first off, what I call the quick and dirty colours. This was all done with default Photoshop brushes on a layer over the lines set on 'Multiply'. By playing around with the different brush and opacity settings one can create an interesting texture over which to do some main colours.

After a bit of refinement, I threw a texture over the colours, basically a layer set on 'Overlay'. The texture in this case comes from a rusted metal column the girlfriend very kindly took a photo of. If you're curious, check out the original photo here.


More playing around with Opacity/brightness settings, and two more textures. One is another photo, this time of an old city wall, which you can check out here. The second is a generic paper texture, taken from Mayang's ultra-useful Texture Library.

Discussion with T concluded that we weren't that happy with the colours - yet. So it was time to tweak the colours; first via a bit of desaturation (through the Saturation/Hue/Lightness panel) and then the blues were increased in order to make the background 'colder' and hopefully the figure would pop out a bit more.

Noisese is generated over the picture (through Filters - Noise - Generate Noise) to give a fine textured effect I tend to quite like. And finally, some excitng sounding (hopefully) magazine text is thrown around in wild abandon. Yes, Schlock issue 2 WILL have a story involving John Keats and a Succubus, so in no way I made that one up. So go check out Schlock for your quality reading needs, and let me know what you think!

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