Daily Monster: Open Source Blot 11 Process

Ninja June 21st, 2007

This lil’ monster is a gift for my friend’s daughter, Sofia. She just turned 3 last month! =) I spent a whole Saturday afternoon with 13 or so of Sofia’s friends. There was a lot of chasing, hand-holding, and tissue-fetching. Her mum also armed me with both a viddy camera and digital camera, so I was trying my best to capture the whole birthday party while watching some of the kiddies. Gosh, it was so tiring! Thankfully, their parents were there too!!

Every once in a while, Sofia sends me collages and turkey hand prints (which I proudly display in my office cube). In the past, I’ve drawn her some crayon sketches, but I thought she’d might like a lil’ monster fun to add to her collection!

Ok, in Adobe Illustrator, start off drawing a simple head with the pen tool.

Next add some hair and a bow with the pen tool.

Draw in the rest of the features. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t actually draw the dress in—I was too lazy.

Still using the pen tool, draw a line to represent the ball’s path. Then go to the Stroke palette (Window > Stroke or Apple + F10). Change the stroke weight to 3 pt, and check the “dashed line” box and type in 15 pts for the dash increment. Save this document and then close Illustrator.

Open the open source blot in Adobe Photoshop. Change the mode to Greyscale (Image > Mode > Greyscale).

Go back to the Mode palette and choose Duotone (Image > Mode > Duotone). Under the Duotone Option palette, select “Monotone” for the type and use 100% Magenta for the color.

Use the eye dropper tool and select the now Magenta blot. Select only the Magenta portion of the image by using Select > Color Range. Choose “Sampled Colors” under the “Select” option and slide the bar all the way to 200 for Fuzziness.

Some of the bits look kind of scraggly and thin. I beefed ‘em up a tad by going to Select > Modify > Expand. Don’t go too crazy. We still want to maintain the same feeling as the original ink blot, so expand the selection only by 1 pixel.

100% Magenta should still be chosen in your color palette. So go to Edit > Fill or Shift + F5 and this will get rid of that slightly translucent bit in the middle of the blot.

Now, open the Illustrator drawing in Photoshop. Since the blot is still selected, copy and paste him into your now-rasterized drawing. Flip him, rotate him, scale him.

Use the airbrush tool with a hard edge setting and draw the rest of the lil’ monster’s features.

After I did all this, I realized that the image should be flipped so the ball would bounce off the monster’s head and into Sofia’s hands. Also her legs were too far from the rest of her body, making her look like she was doing the Michael Jackson lean, so I shifted them to align with her torso. I also tilted her head down to make her look at the monster, instead of looking off into the distance. Then with the airbrush, I made her smile a wee wider (amazing what a few pixels will do). And there you have it!

Enjoy + happy drawing!
Cheers,

Ninja =)

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