Under a Juniper Sky

What, I have a blog? I don't remember this at all. Oh well, might as well add some stuff to it.

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.

 

Lastly I did what I did before to this other picture from Japan. It was a room I stayed in in a Buddhist temple , and it was really wonderful place. I added outlines and details to get rid of some of the filter's artifacts and also to give it more of a hand-illustrated look.

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.