"Prayer"

Nikolai

For some reason I decided to try the "photo-realistic line drawing technique" described by Deke McClelland in his "Deke Space" column in April/May and June issues of Photoshop User magazine.

The recipe includes about a dozen of not-so-very-trivial steps, and since it's also a magazine article, I don't feel like violating his copyright by redescribing them. Yet the technique seems rather interesting, so I would recommend to get a hold of those two issues and play with it.

It took me a while before I figured out the "essense" and came out with the specific set of parameters that worked for my particular image.
But I liked the end result. :-)

So, without further ado, please welcome:

A prayer:



And, in case you were curious what the original looked like:



Enjoy photography as art!

OrvSal

An interesting rendition and you have done it well. I like it when photography does not stay in a "box". Creativity starts when the boundries are broken and a fresh approach is tried.

Nikolai

Orv,

OrvSal wrote:

An interesting rendition and you have done it well. I like it when photography does not stay in a "box". Creativity starts when the boundries are broken and a fresh approach is tried.

Thanks, appreciate it!

Nikolai

Man, am I having a blast with this!

Nikolai wrote:

For some reason I decided to try the "photo-realistic line drawing technique" described by Deke McClelland in his "Deke Space" column in April/May and June issues of Photoshop User magazine.

As Deke promised in his article, once you get your hands wrapped around this, you're gonna have a field day!
After playing this whole morning with it I managed to create an action (68 steps!!!) that does most of the dirty work for me.
Once it's done I only need to tweak the artistically important parts (opacity, manual masking and such).
In his article Deke says you should be prepared to spend 10-15 minutes only on ONE of those steps (granted, the most boring one).
With the action I wrote I can go from zero to hero in about 5 min *total* - or so my current experience tells me.

Here's an example of such action-based 5 min work:

Helen:



Enjoy!

PS. 29+ minutes in queue - what's up with that???

DavidTO

Here's a tutorial that caught my eye.

Nikolai

David,

DavidTO wrote:

Here's a tutorial that caught my eye.

Thanks for the link!

It's slightly different, though. It involves a lot of - rather tedious, I'd say - hand-based manipulations.
Deke's approach is akin to Dan Margulis' one: (almost) everything's done globally, so no shaky handses are required :-)

I'd say it's like that draganizer action we all had a ball with a year or so ago: at a few points you need to do something manually, but no surgical precision is required.

And check the intricacy of different levels of hatching in this 100% crop: