Sometimes, I think the wife likes having a househusband...especially one who likes to work at all hours of the night in Photoshop and Illustrator. This weeks task, turn the top photo here into some sort of sketch or line art for a genealogy flyer for the library. It wasn't even her flyer. Oh well, it gave me the opportunity to work at all hours in Photoshop and Illustrator, so who am I to complain. I got to make a spiffy little line art image, do some clean up on a couple of scanned images the wife drew, and messed with the flyer a little.
All-in-all, I think it took about 8 hours of playing. If I did more work in Illustrator, it probably could have been done in less than 5, but most everything I mess with calls for Photoshop and not Illustrator. (Just in case you are wondering, there are huge differences between the programs which I won't discuss here. But you could sum it up in three words 'raster versus vector', and one day, I might explain that...That one day might be soon.)
The image is far from perfect, and there is a lot I would have liked to have done...most of it popping back into my head now that I am looking at the image again. Normally after about 4 hours of working on an image, my mind starts to convince me I am done, so a lot of details get forgotten. Which is why I normally try to work in 2-4 hour chunks of time over a couple of days. The wife had given me this project Sunday, but I was still caught up in rewriting my texting code for rantfest so I pushed it off. I had a couple of really embarrassing roughs on Monday and early Tuesday, so I scrapped them. So distraction, failure, and the idea that I had all day today to work on it as well, led to my marathon last night. Had I split it up, more of those missing details would have worked their way in. Of course, since the image on the flyer is only slightly larger than what is shown in my thumbnail here, they would have been lost anyways.
I did have a lot of fun working on this though. It is a far more complex image than it looks like. All the textured pieces have at least two layers (background and texture). I made a few custom swatches and symbols for the project, though most were not used. I am not sure if I will revisit this image, but I am pretty pleased with how it turned out.
