Day 13 - Complete

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Today’s project began with acrylic paper and acrylic paints.  Valentine’s Day is coming soon so I decided to create something romantic.  I thought it might be sort of interesting to show the process involved in making this.

When I first started doing this, I was almost nervous – like someone was watching over my shoulder and it made me a little nervous, lol.  Anyway, this doesn’t look like much, as most of work doesn’t to begin with, but somehow it ends up looking o.k. when it’s finished…not perfect, not enough for someone to say “WOW!  That’s amazing!”, but at least it turns out o.k..

Once I took the picture you see here, I began to fill in the paint. Now it’s starting to look better and more along the lines of what I want it to look like.

Now that I have the basic highlight and shadow colors, I take this picture and save a copy to my computer to work with in my graphic programs.  The first thing I wanted to do was take the background out and leave nothing but the drawing.  Once I got the background removed, I then began to enhance the painting to look stronger and more colorful.

Generally when I do something like this, I like to save several different sizes and versions of it so I can reuse it in another project.  I have the large size which is usually a 10×10, 300dpi image which means it’s 3000×3000 pixels.  That size works really well for most all things that need to be printed on something because the resolution is high enough to make it look really clear and sharp.

One thing to mention here is working with layers.  If you are like me and you like to have different versions where maybe it looks a little bit different in each one, layers is the way to go.  Sometimes I put another object into the project and maybe decide as I progress that I don’t like it there or maybe I want to position it in another place.  If I didn’t have the layers, that would mean undoing an awful lot and then starting over.  Putting one layer on top of another is excellent because I can just click on that layer, do something different with it, move it around or whatever I want without messing with the rest of the art.

So, here is the finished product to be used in my shop on a greeting card. See ya tomorrow!