Stamp Development / Technical Skills
Using the roughly sketched stamp layout, I developed each of the stamps by hand-drawing them and editing them in Photoshop. As I have very basic knowledge of Photoshop, I had to follow tutorials online to get the results that I wanted from scanning and manipulating my drawings.
The tutorial I followed was: https://www.skillshare.com/tutorials/Coloring-with-Photoshop-From-Sketch-to-Fully-Colored-Illustration-Simplified-Edition/12
The scenes I chose to recreate within the stamps were:
- The White Rabbit with his pocket watch
- The ‘Drink Me’ bottle
- Alice growing too big in the White Rabbit’s house
- Alice meeting the caterpillar
- Cheshire Cat
- Mad tea party
- Painting the roses red
- The playing cards chasing Alice
Once I had scanned the illustrations I adjusted the levels, making the black lines darker and white background whiter. This saved time in editing the drawings as it removed some of the marks that were on the paper. I used the clone stamp tool to remove any marks on the background then inverted the image — this gave the white on black image that I wanted. If necessary at this point I would go back into the levels and adjust them to make sure that the lines were clear. This part of the editing process was using knowledge that I already had in Photoshop, the next steps required the tutorial linked above.
01. Open the scanned image in Photoshop
02. Go to Adjustments, Levels and adjust accordingly. I did this until the black lines were dark enough but not all of the detail was erased. The white was edited until any remaining marks were removed from the background *
03. In the layers panel on the right hand side, select Channels, press ctrl and click RGB. The background will be selected and outlined
04. Press shift, ctrl, I — this will invert the selection so that the line drawing is selected
05. Use the brush tool to draw over the lines in black to even the colour
06. Continuing with the brush tool, select orange (or another colour) and draw over the key element
02. If adjusting the white background did not remove all of the darker marks I did not want, I would later use the clone stamp tool to remove them.
This is an example of how I applied the technical skills I developed during this project. When I was editing my stamp illustrations I would invert them first to get the white on black illustrations that I wanted. The process following this first step was the same as in the demonstration.
The only stamp that was not manipulated in Photoshop was ‘painting the roses red’ as it was created using Illustrator.
