Monday, January 23

Engraved Barak Obama

Finished Copperplate Engraving (like on dollar bills depicting Presidents Lincoln, Jefferson etc)  This portrait of Barack Obama was quite a steep learning curve to create digitally.

I  tried the usual engraving plugins at first but these fell short of what I wanted to achieve.  However photoshop's own 'Liquidize' filter worked well once I got the hang of it, using its brushes I dragged parallel lines, drawing them over a template layer of Obama's image.  Once I got the hang of it I found this to be the best method for this authentic look of the genuine article. Not a bad effort.

Those plug-ins mimic only the photo-gravure affect so really won't do for copperplate style because they fall short where lines need to follow contours of Obama's face. (Photo-Gravure only lays a pre-defined pattern on top of light\dark areas, just too flat for what i had in mind.)

I could offer more detailed explanation as to why one doesn't come across 'Copperplate' as a digital style in today's graphics design world but for now I'll just say A~WHAMBAM~BOOM! is now available as a limited-edition of 200 signed prints, size: A3. Cost: £40 inc' post and packing in tube.
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8 comments:

  2. do you have a tutorial on how to make this??

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  3. I don't have a tutorial for reproducing this copperplate technique, as i say in the post - it was achieved by trial error using the 'liquidize' filter in photoshop. I very almost gave up on it but slowly all the experiments began to make sense and couldn't begin to explain it as that would be even more excruciating. Sorry.

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  5. How did you make the lines to start with?

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    Replies

    1. I started by making very basic stripes constructed by first using the Line-tool set as Vecter-shape with weight set at 20px, then i dragged out the first line onto a new file with Grid view set at 20px spacing, and 'Snap to grid' selected.

      Then copy\paste your line so it snaps to grid at 20px from original line.

      Repeat until you have as many evenly spaced stripes as you think you may need, 30 or 50 lines should be plenty for selecting them all and saving as a custom shape by Edit >Define Custom Shape.

      Now you have stripes saved as a 'custom shape' you can now drag your custom shape over an image-template layer. The next stage is the Liquidize filter.. is quite tricky to build up the copperplate engraved effect.

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    2. Thanks! I've tried quite a bit and I am suprisingly happy with the effect, even though i don't got your skills (yet ;-). Really awsome! Thanks for sharing

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