Copy

I was looking at Pinterest for ideas and came across the illustrator Lindsay J. Haynes and went onto her website to look at more of her work.

I found this design and loved the look of it and the way that the watercolour had been used to blend the different colours together. It is also part of my subject matter and so i decided it would be a good idea to copy it.
I started off by drawing out each separate section of the illustration, the background, the outline of the castle, the lighter parts of the castle and then the darker parts. After doing that I went ahead and used watercolour to colour each part, making sure to get the effect of that part right. When I had finished all the parts I scanned them and put them onto Photoshop and attempted to align them together. I soon realised that this wasn't giving the look I first wanted and did not make it look like the original.
I decided to draw it out again, but as a whole drawing. After doing that I did the same and used watercolour to add colour and the drawing. I scanned it into Photoshop and this was the result that I got.

I was incredibly happy with how it turned out but felt that it needed a little something else and so i decided to draw out the illustration again, but using different materials such as a blunt pencil and a cut up brush with ink. Using the pencil I drew out 2 outlines, one with very little detail and one with a lot more detail.

 

I then put these into Photoshop and decided to play around with the image editing it to make the lines more detailed. At first I used threshold so that the ink image a definite black and white image, and added it onto the watercolour image.

Although the lines don't fully match up, I really like the effect that this gives the water-coloured image and the way that the brush lines aren't exact and are scratchy gives the piece more texture. However I realised that the lines weren't as exact as I wanted, and seemed too thick and full on for the type of piece this is. I decided to use the thinner pencil outline drawings instead of the thicker ink drawing.

For the second part of my copy I decided to first change the levels of the watercolored image, to see if it gave a different effect, and I think this made a big difference to the quality of the colours and made the technique of watercolour more noticeable. I then went ahead and added in the pencil-drawn lines, making them black and lining them up best i could with the main image. I also decided to use multiply to make the lines look like they had already been drawn on the original image and not placed on top. Another thing i did to change this copy slightly was to take out the blue parts of the sky that were in the middle of some of the clouds. I think this gave a more clean-cut effect to the design and makes it look less careless and sloppy.

I am very happy with how this turned out and is definitely my favourite of the two copies. I really like how changing the levels meant that the whole piece changed, looking brighter and more aesthetically pleasing with the colours being more vibrant.