Making Backgrounds
My Technique for turning Photos into Art with Photoshop.
The most common question I get asked about my game Faery Tale, is: How did I do the graphics?
The short answer is Photoshop.
-- Every image is a multi-layered photo-manipulation that was heavily filtered multiple times to make them look like fairy tale art.
I'm a big-time art nouveau fan, as in the art of Alphonse Mucha, so that was the style I was aiming for.
While I am not about to give away every single secret to my techniques, mainly because they took months of experimentation to figure out, I am willing to reveal the basic process.
It all begins with Photoshop and quite a few Art Plug-Ins, such as:
- Topaz Labs: Clean 3, Adjust 4, and Simplify3
- Alien Skin Snap Art 2
- Imagenomic
And yes, I used ALL of these plug-ins for each image; background and characters.
The most important part of the process, however, is the Line Art. That was done using the Color Sketch action from 10 Sketch Effects, a Photoshop actions set that is available free on Deviant Art.
How I do it:
-- In Photoshop...
Stage 1: Pick a good image.
Stage 2: Photo-manipulate the image to suit your needs, then duplicate the finished image so that you have two layers.
Stage 3: Hide the copy layer. On the Background layer, make the lines using the Color Sketch action from 10 Sketch Effects.
Stage 4: Level the lines to darken them, then Reduce Noise to clean it. After that, Art Filter the line art to make them look more like a sketch.
I use a rather expensive art plug-in for this process, but you can make a somewhat rougher version for Free by using Drawing and Threshold Actions 1 by eGulumse, specifically, the first action: 1- Çizim+path. (Experiment with the different styles. You might find one that works better for you.)
The trick is to make your line art with the 1 Color Sketch action, SAVE A JPG COPY in your files, (but don't close it!!!) Run the 1- Çizim+path on the color sketch line art. This will give you this result:
Stage 5: Hide the line art layer. Turn on the copy layer and Art Filter the untouched layer to make it look like a painting or drawing, or both.
I use another rather expensive plug in for this process, but Photo to Watercolour Action by
cazcastalla is a fairly reasonable and Free substitute.
Stage 6: Turn on the Lines layer and set it on top of the Art layer. Set the Lines to Multiply at 50% Opacity, then Merge the layers.
Stage 7: Overlay and Soft Light artistic textures over top of the whole thing to make the image look even more like art.
I overlay a personally created scribble
texture to break up the flatness of the colors then softlight two different splotchy watercolor-style textures, but a
sketch type screentone texture can work for the scribble
texture, and watercolor textures are easy to find on DeviantArt.
Enjoy!
