From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

786 Combining multiple works of line art

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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786 Combining multiple works of line art

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today, we're still inside Photoshop, and we're going to take that artwork from last week and we're going to add some additional line art and mask out my face, of course, with the ultimate intention of uniformly coloring all of the lines, even though they're on independent layers, and yes, that does present us with a challenge. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's where we're going and here's where we are so far. And notice the filename, Colorful Head. That info will come in handy in just a moment when I switch over to this image file right here, which once again comes to us from the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. All right, notice that the artwork layer itself is selected here inside the Layers panel, and so armed with my rectangular Marquee tool, up here near the top of the Toolbox, I'll go ahead and right click inside the Image window and choose Duplicate Layer, and then I'll change the document to Colorful Head, that file I mentioned a moment ago, and then I'll click Okay. Now I'll go ahead and switch back to that file, and you can see over here inside the Layers panel, that the new piece of artwork appears in front of all the other layers at the top of the stack. All right, now just as we did last week, I need to jump all the black lines to an independent layer, and you can do that by switching over to the Channels panel, then press and hold the Control key or the Command key on the Mac, so that you're seeing a dashed square along with that pointing finger cursor, and then literally click anywhere you like. So you can click on the RGB item, or you can click on the red, green, or blue channel. Doesn't make any difference. Now at this point we've selected all the white stuff and deselected the black stuff. We want just the opposite, so I'll go up to the Select menu and choose Inverse, and that will reverse the selection. All right, now I'll switch back over to the Layers panel, and I kind of misspoke there. I said we need to jump those lines to a new layer. You absolutely do not want to jump them, by the way. That was horrible advice on my part. Instead what you want to do is create a new layer by pressing Control, Shift, N, or Command, Shift, N on the Mac, and I'll just go ahead and name this layer 70743654 because that is the ID number for this particular piece of artwork in the Dreamstime image library, and I'll click Okay, and then I'll tap the D key just so that I make sure that I have my default foreground and background colors, which means that my foreground color is black, as you can see down here at the bottom of the Toolbox, and then I'll press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac to fill the selection with that foreground color, black. And now I'll press Control D or Command D on the Mac to deselect the artwork. Then I'll select that original layer right there, which has the same name, and I'll press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. All right, now at this point, this floral artwork is getting all over my face, which is not what I want, and so naturally I'm going to mask that layer. But I'm going to make things easier on myself using the Magic Wand tool, which was the very tool I told you not to use last week. And so let me show you what I'm talking about. I'm going to select the Floating Head layer right there, and then I'm going to go ahead and select my Magic Wand tool from the Quick Selection tool fly-out menu, and then you want to right click on that Magic Wand icon on the far left side of the Options bar and choose Reset Tool, and that will ensure that you're selecting just the contiguous pixels, which is what we want, and that you're not sampling all layers. We just want to sample the Floating Head layer and nothing more, and then if you're working along with me, click outside of my head. Now that selects everything outside my head, but the selection is leaking to the inside of my head because there's a bunch of gaps in the hair, and that's because I have baby fine hair, by the way. So I've sketched it accurately, full of holes. In any case, even though this isn't a perfect selection, it's a good starting point, and so I'll go ahead and select that top layer, and then I'll drop down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and click on it in order to mask some of that layer away. All right, now what we need to do is view the layer mask by itself by Alt or Option clicking on this thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and boy oh boy is it a beauty. All right, so obviously we have some work to do. I'm going to go ahead and select my Brush tool, which I can get by pressing the B key, and then I'll right click inside the image window and crank the hardness value up to 100%, and then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac to accept that change. And now I'm going to increase the size of my cursor by pressing the right bracket key. Notice that in my case the foreground color is black. If it's not that way for you, just go ahead and tap the D key. That'll make it white, followed by the X key to switch 'em, and now I'm going to click in my earlobe right there, and I'm just going to click at a few locations inside the ear. I don't really want to paint, 'cause I don't want to mess things up, which I already am, by the way. Notice I left a gap right there, and so I'll just click at a few other locations right there, and then I'll start painting. Now I feel good about painting because we've got some big stretches, and by the way, I'm clicking and shift clicking to paint in straight lines. And I'm just trying to bolster these edges here, and if you leave something out, then just go ahead and paint over it, and if you go too far, just go ahead and undo. And what I recommend is that you keep your brush strokes pretty short so that if you do make a big mistake like this, you don't have big consequences. All right, so I'll go ahead and undo that guy, and then I'll just paint up in this region in the hair. I don't really know where I want to paint in the hair. I'll figure that out later, but for now I'm just going to kind of paint around and about like so, and then I want to fill in my face because it's horrifying, and so I'll increase the size of my cursor by pressing the right bracket key a few times, and then I'll just paint it away like so. All right, that's enough masking, and so I'll just go ahead and Alter Option click on that Layer Mask thumbnail in order to switch back to the full color composition. And that's it, that is how you combine multiple works of line art here inside Photoshop. All right, now I hold in my hands a magnified detail from our existing artwork, and we've got a couple of problems. First of all, there's gaps between the old line art and the new line art, and the new line art is black. It's not colored. What we want is to eliminate those gaps, and we want to have uniform coloring as well. And so, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie, in which I show you how to do just that by combining the two line art layers into a group and then clipping the dark watercolors to that group. If you're looking forward to next week, we are going to finish off the artwork. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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