Lewa and Pearl

Lewa and Pearl, an experiment to test out my accuracy height chart created one night on a scrap piece of paper. My curiosity needed to be fed, to know the mysterious question of how tall in accuracy in comparison to myself is a Toa, and what does that look like? 

After some sketching and mathematical irritation, I got two concept charts of measurement, the first experiment on the left, and the second main chart on the right. After finding a way to convert feet and inches into a smaller scale of accuracy on paper, I found Toa are pretty big, but not as huge as some may visualize in comparison to a human. I used this graph as a guide to create a photo of Lewa from the Life of Lewa universe (it's an alternate world) standing next to Pearl (me). As you can see above, a Toa is rather large compared to Pearl, but not as towering as some may think. If Pearl were to give Lewa a hug, her head would at least snuggle nicely against his belly. Granted, I wouldn't want to be chased by something like this...especially not after looking at the size of Lewa's feet, finally seeing they are indeed the size of half my torso.

This specific image of Lewa has been in line for years to be made into a poster for Life Of Lewa, so I went ahead and made a stand alone image to give him the spotlight. As mentioned, this build of Lewa stands for his more jungly self in the Life of Lewa series.

I made cropped versions of these as well, to focus on the scene more.

Side note, Lewa and Pearl either met at this spot to talk, or they're heading for some place in the jungle. Lewa going for a walk willingly...what madness is this? O.O

An artistic experiment of the pictures created on Jan. 2, 2018.

Writing from the future, I wanted to make these pictures feel more natural, as though they were paintings in a journal instead of photographs which have been merged together. I go into more detail about the subject of converting a photo manipulated image into something that looks painted in the PS paint filter experiment post on my main blog.

I like the idea of painted looking images, because I feel that if I were keeping a journal in a fantasy setting, there would be a more likely case of having painted images on a page over actual photographs which require a camera.

On January 2, 2018, I went back to the Youtube video I had watched before on how to make an image look like watercolor, and I got this. It's not too bad, some details are of course lost, but I like the way it turned out.

I made a few duplicate layers of my image in PSE, one of those layers I applied a cutout filter to, then took that image and applied a smart blur to it. I then created a copy of this layer, reverted i,t and turned the blending mode to color dodge. On this layer I painted over it using a watercolor brush set to 9% opacity. Once the painting was done, I duplicated my layers, merged them, and applied a sandstone texture through the texturise filter.

Created Jan. 3, 2018

Only difference between this version above and the ones below are the slightly darker edges which give the picture more of a 'drawn with pen' appearance.

After a basic watercolor effect over a cutout filtered image, I played around further with the images from this collection the following day, and discovered a technique I really like the look of.

I wanted more detail while still having a watercolor effect that made the images blend together and appear like an actual painted illustration from a story book.

To achieve this I took my base photo manipulated picture, duplicated it, and applied a colored pencil effect from filters. I then set this layers mode to lighter color. Beneath this layer I created a solid color layer of dusty dark brown. I then duplicated my base image again, applied a cutout filter, and reduced noise. I then set this layers mode to darker color, reduced opacity to 88%, and set it above the colored pencil layer. Then I duplicated this cutout filtered layer, inverted it, brought the opacity back up to 100%, and switched the mode to color dodge. I then took a watercolor brush at 9%, adjusting the opacity as needed, and painted on this layer to get a watercolor effect over colored pencil.

I adjusted levels for some parts, and played around with a light yellow gradient set beneath all the layers except the solid color layer. The yellow gradient gave me a warm sunlight effect, as show in the right image above.

My first experiment with watercolor over colored pencil in PSE was of just this character (Lewa), standing by himself in a forest scene.

I find my favorite version of this one is the warm light version shown here. Sunlight that's hazy, but bright makes me feel relaxed.

I also played with other settings to get a basic version (left), and a glowing version (right), which was a result of changing the cutout filter layer to the pin light blending mode.

The shading effects on the tree and such were done using different colors on the color dodge layer. I darkened areas with gray brown and black, but added light to spots using a soft, warm yellow.

June 22, 2018 (as a guess date).

A final experiment from the future of June 2018, I discovered a free and easy to use site called Lunapic which allowed me to explore filters of different kinds over my pictures. Upper left corner was abstract filter, upper right the coffee filter, and lower versions were both a dark filter. Original color of that filter is the left version, and then I decreased the effect to show more color on the right.

The filters were interesting, though I think I like what I did before in PSE. The abstract one is pretty interesting for a jungle theme though, it reminds me of banana leaves. Of course coffee had to be an option because I like coffee. 

Using filters did seem to help make the picture solid and hide artifacting to some degree.