I was working on some stuff this weekend, trying to get myself back in the swing of things. Specifically I was looking into doing a style that would allow 3d renders, photographs and sketches to live together as a single style. Oh, and it should be somewhat easy to do and also not look too stiff. And look cool.
But that's not how it started. It /started/ with me looking at some of my old stuff I never finished and seeing if I could bring 'em to finish. One didn't work out, but this second one went well. And, using a new style I figured out, I think it came out pretty well. Here's the picture:
I'm actually pretty happy with it. It's a picture I started working on about a year ago but I never took it to final. Specifically I wanted to give a feeling of both a constricted area, but one full of life and color. Anyway the style I used to break up sheer toon-shaded CG is a combination of Photoshop filters. You can see it more in my next picture:
It's basically using multiple layers using the cutout filter with various settings. It ends up giving me something that hopefully looks more like a woodcut and less like a toon shader or a simple photograph (BTW, this is a picture I took in Japan in 1999. Almost everything done to it is done with filters, as opposed to touching it up by hand).
Now this one I definitely touched up. It's one of the waterfalls in Yosemite. After running the filters over the photograph, I drew over it in Photoshop to add in details and make areas more clearly understood. Then I added a bit of blur to a faded layer and increased the contrast to give the overall picture a bit more of a glow. I just wanted enough to make the picture be a bit more unified, and I think it worked. What's more, it was rather fun to do.
Overall I'm pretty happy with how this is working out. This style is allowing me to be fairly flexible in how I use it, and if I get some other pictures I like, I'll be sure to put em up here.
