What Shall I Do Today?
So I had a few ideas for today’s post. What I originally wanted to do was take this week’s free font on Veer and make a design with it. Though the font was beautifully crafted, Organon Sans Demibold is kind of boring in context of a design focusing on it. Not only is Organon more of a body copy typeface, but it also only comes in one style for free: demibold. Do you know how hard it is to make a typographic layout with only one font?
If you are saying to yourself right now, “Man! Shelby is a little baby! I could totally make a layout with only one style of a simple sans serif,” you are right. Its not that difficult. Tons of people do it with just Helvetica all the time. I just couldn’t think of a good way to present Organon Sans in the right light.
Alice in Wonderland
After giving up on trying to figure out what to do with Organon, I started working on this web page I’ve been working on for a later blog entry again. The web page is meant to teach me how to do the awesome effect seen on Ben the Bodyguard. Instead of going for the “crime in the big city” motif; however, I’m going with the Alice in Wonderland theme.
The sad part is though that much of the power making Ben the Bodyguard is the illustrations. That’s why I’ve been stuck just working on illustrations so far. It’s not a bad thing but illos just take time and prevent me from the learning process. You know? Oh well. I did have a lot of fun coloring in this pen drawing I made a few weeks back.
If anyone knows what the best way to scan/edit a line drawing so to easily and quickly start coloring, please tell me. I felt like I spent so much time just masking the lines, I was wondering if there is an easier way. This is what I did:
- Scan drawing into Photoshop.
- Use levels to increase contrast, remove paper texture and remaining eraser marks, and remove paint stroke marks.
- In the Channels palette, duplicate the blue channel and load the new selection.
- Mask the scanned image.
- Go back in and brush/erase the parts of the image that the mask didn’t work perfectly on.
That’s how I did it but it took me a long time to work on the edges so if you have any advice, please share.
Anyway, seeing that this illo was for another entry, I felt I shouldn’t make it today’s so instead, I made a drop cap. Today’s S was based on some black letter S forms and then simplified. I then added the purple because I feel like I haven’t made a purple drop cap in a while.
Hope you like it.
