Robot Rage

I drew a sketch of an enraged robot this morning. Since I liked the look of it, I decided to work with it a little more using a Photoshop technique I'd read about. Here's the finished product:

I started off with the basic sketch, scanned it into Photoshop at about 300dpi and used it as a base layer. Before using the sketch, I set the levels so that only the black lines remained. I also desaturated that level, because there were some strangely coloured pixels along the lines - remnants of the cream-coloured page.

Next, I went to Stock.Exchange and downloaded a piece of paper to use as a background texture.

Setting the sketch layer to multiply mode left just the basic sketch on top of the paper, which looked pretty cool to start with. Just like my old homework books, covered in doodles.

I used two extra layers to finish the drawing. First, I created a layer to give my robot some depth - I coloured in the dark areas of the picture (the head and neck) in a dark turquoise colour. Then I set the blending mode of the layer to soft light, and the turquoise was replaced with this awesome darkening of the paper effect.

The next layer was set to multiply blending and I used it to give a little bit of colour to the eyes, nose and mouth. I could have spent a bit more time on all of this, but I decided to rush through and finish it as a proof of concept.

Here's the original sketch of the robot, just to show how horrendous the original drawing was. I'm very pleased with how things turned out.