SGA Ornaments
Dec. 21st, 2008 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nakedbeeI decided to mark one of my obsessions this year by making a few Stargate Atlantis-themed Christmas ornaments. Merry Christmas!
Larger image
Feel free to use these drawings as clip-art for your own projects ... higher resolution versions of each are available in my LJ scrapbook here.
Technique explanation
I've been practicing my tracing skills recently. I'm still a bit intimidated by free-hand drawing, but this technique is pretty fun, in a soothing, coloring-book kind of way. I started with a reference photo in one layer of Photoshop (sometimes a collage of several photos if I couldn't find one good one of the whole object (the ZPM was particularly difficult)). Then I used the polygonal lasso to trace around the outlines of the object, deliberately simplifying and using bold, jaunty angles. Bit by bit I filled in the outlines with black using the paint bucket tool until I had all the black outlines I wanted. In a new layer (underneath the outlines) I added color, using either the brush or the lasso-and-bucket-fill method as with the outlines. Oh, and I generally used the eyedropper to select colors from the reference image rather than choosing them from scratch. Then I printed them out and hung them on the Christmas tree. :)
Here's an exploded diagram of the layers in the "Ronon's gun" image. It feels a little silly to make a step-by-step tutorial for this technique (I mean, does anyone really want instructions for how to trace?), but I had a good time making it, so there. Hmmm, maybe I'll even finally stop being lazy and post something to instructables.com - I keep meaning to.
Larger image
Feel free to use these drawings as clip-art for your own projects ... higher resolution versions of each are available in my LJ scrapbook here.
Technique explanation
I've been practicing my tracing skills recently. I'm still a bit intimidated by free-hand drawing, but this technique is pretty fun, in a soothing, coloring-book kind of way. I started with a reference photo in one layer of Photoshop (sometimes a collage of several photos if I couldn't find one good one of the whole object (the ZPM was particularly difficult)). Then I used the polygonal lasso to trace around the outlines of the object, deliberately simplifying and using bold, jaunty angles. Bit by bit I filled in the outlines with black using the paint bucket tool until I had all the black outlines I wanted. In a new layer (underneath the outlines) I added color, using either the brush or the lasso-and-bucket-fill method as with the outlines. Oh, and I generally used the eyedropper to select colors from the reference image rather than choosing them from scratch. Then I printed them out and hung them on the Christmas tree. :)
Here's an exploded diagram of the layers in the "Ronon's gun" image. It feels a little silly to make a step-by-step tutorial for this technique (I mean, does anyone really want instructions for how to trace?), but I had a good time making it, so there. Hmmm, maybe I'll even finally stop being lazy and post something to instructables.com - I keep meaning to.