Walltip: "Let Sleeping Wolves Lie" Walkthrough

Today's walltip is a quick walkthrough of "Let Sleeping Wolves Lie".
Step 1: Vector trace
This is a pretty straight forward step. You go into a vector program and you trace your images. I started with Amaterasu of course, and then built the rest of the scene around her. I traced varying elements of the waterfall image and placed them in appropriate places. By tracing, I can make sure all the elements match and are consistent with each other. You'd never know there was supposed to be a shrine in the image now!

Step 2: Mix with original image to get colors
A vector can't capture everything about an image. In this case, there was a lot of great texture in the rock face and island that would not have been feasible to trace, so I matched up those elements of the waterfall image to the trace. I also added some general texture and did a color tint towards yellow, since in the end I want the image to have an aged feeling.

Step 3: Blend colors
A lot of the colors have sharp transitions (from the vector trace) or are messy (aligning the waterfall image with the vector) so I went and used the blender brush in Painter to meld things together. This is prepwork for the watercolor clone stage, as we'll want more gradual color transitions in the watercolor.

Step 4: Watercolor clone
The image was repainted with Painter's watercolor brush. The outlines are on a separate layer so they remain nice and crisp. There's not much to this step but a lot of work, since I limited myself to a max brush size of 10px (it takes a long time to cover 3840x2880 worth of canvas!) The key to the watercolor is to match the direction of the brush strokes with the color transitions/gradations. At this point I also added in the flowers of the island that I blended out in the previous step.

Step 5: Texture and color corrections
I have a bunch of paper textures in Photoshop from old wallpapers, so I just reused them here. Adding the texture increases the yellow tint (since I am basically adding yellow-colored texture) and this made the water and sky too green, so I did some quick color correction to make them blueish again.

And there you have it. 5 easy steps to a great wall... or is it?

Vectorlicious + Painterlicious

My latest forays into Illustrator mavenry has been heavy utilization of the art brushes. I've use art brushes before, but mostly as accents to a greater picture; this brush-painted styled Mushishi wall uses a few art brush strokes, but mostly it's filled shapes with some tweak and roughen filters applied to them to give it the sketchy edging. There's also some calligraphic brushes in there because when you set the width to random it can mimic a varying stroke line without any work on your part - but it's unpredictable since it's the computer that decides how wide to make the outline.
However, after reading a tutorial on creating (and using) art brushes I've decided to give it more of a go. (Computer Arts magazine from the UK is really a wonderful resource. I only wish it didn't have to be shipped overseas because it makes it so expensive! Thankfully many of their articles and tutorials are reproduced on their website!) I've already done several tests and have been happy with the calligraphic style. Creating your own art brushes means you have total control over how the edges taper out or not, which is not something easily achievable with a calligraphic brush. I hope to use this technique to make several more Mushishi walls, since it's got such a rural, classic Japanese feel to it that a calligraphic brush-styled wall would complement. So far I have another Ginko wall (which will be very dark, so I may cheat on all the effects) as well as a Nui wall (which I'm thinking will be more brush-on-parchment styled, and should showcase this technique wonderfully.)
We'll see how it turns out. After all, vectorlicious and painterlicious shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

Vectorlicious vs Painterlicious

I haven't made a wallpaper without using Illustrator for some part of the wall in quite some time (since "Welcoming the Dragon" in June, to be precise.) No particular reason why except I really like playing around in Illustrator a lot more than playing around in Photoshop. Also, I've been into clean, crisp images with very few colors, and Illustrator pulls off that sort of wallpaper a lot more easily than Photoshop, and I've been choosing scans to that effect as well.
Looks like I'll finally be breaking that trend. The Mushishi scan I wanted to work with was in a very delicate watercolor style, and although I was initially tempted to try and use vectors to recreate the effect (and push Illustrator's natural brushes to their limit) I backed away from that idea because I think I've just been doing too many vectors lately. My other skills feel like they're getting rusty.
This wall will be done in a smudge-painterly style, with copious amounts of paper texture to maintain that watercolor feel. I don't do too many smudge-painterly styled walls, but it's rather relaxing to smooth out the details. In many ways it produces an image totally opposite from a vector's crisp outlines, but hey, variety is good.
I think this style will suit the Mushishi manga image much better as well.