Sunday, July 21, 2019

Baby Elephant Illustration

     I created this baby elephant in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet.  I looked at references of African elephants since they have big ears, which I thought would look cute.  I started the file at 300 ppi around 8-1/2-11 inches.  The "inks" took the most time due to my nit-picky finessing, zooming in to shape every stroke.  I set the foreground color to Black, and the background color to White.  Using the Brush tool, hitting the "x" key to switch back and forth between black and white as I went.
     I had to blast through the coloring, as my deadline loomed nigh.  I turned the background with the inks into a layer and set it to Multiply.  I created a second layer, named it Color, and dragged it beneath the ink layer.  Then I locked the ink layer so I couldn't mess it up.
     Clicking the Color layer, I used one middle color for the body, basically a warm gray.  Then one shadow color for the bottom of the feet and the edges of the linework, and one highlight color opposite the shadow color.  I also used some white and light blue for the eyes, and some pink for the tongue.  I made the grass using the Smudge tool to pull the green up into the blue at the top of the green area, and pulling the blue up into the green area at the bottom.
Inks


Color

     I opened my signature logo file in Illustrator, changed the date, and copied from Illustrator and pasted into the Photoshop file as a Smart Object.  I resized my logo by manipulating the bounding box, and placed the logo where I wanted. :)

Photoshop CS2

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