ZOOM in for a better look at the inking effect. Once more I’m working on a Western project that requires a lot of illustrations of cowboys, Indians, and various characters from the Wild West. I’ve collected a pretty decent-sized library of Poser props, characters, and buildings, but there’s one problem: these are for publication, in black & white, and I don’t want them to look like they were done in Poser. I need to make them look like old pen and ink artwork, so I’m running some tests to see what combination of rendering styles and Photoshop filters I can use to create the effect I desire. Since I will be working with a lot of images, some of the design criteria are: - Can the effect be created relatively quickly (which means I don’t want to “ink” it by hand on my graphics tablet)? - Can I create a consistent style, so that the images look as though they were created by a single person? This is my first test and I’m focusing on the style (so please, don’t comment on the poses or composition – I’ll deal with that in later tests). For this test I experimented with the sketch rendering settings in Poser 7 and then played around with some filters and adjustments in Photoshop CS3. STEP ONE: I stopped thinking in color and started thinking in terms of contrast. In order for the sketch renderer to have something to work with, it needed to have clearly delineated pieces. In other words, black hair blends into the black shadows under both of their hats, and the Indian’s brown gun holster was blending into the dark brown shadows inside his duster. So, in the Materials Room I set the holster to an-almost white shade of brown and turned their hair orange. It looked hideous in color, but they were actually visible when rendered as sketches. STEP TWO: Think big! In the sketch settings I defined large differences in the starting and ending width of the strokes. I did this so there would be a decent amount of variation in the edges. I then rendered it at 4000 pixels wide! This took a lot of memory, but it was worth it. The final render revealed a lot of fine detail that would have been thick and clumpy at a lower resolution. STEP THREE: In Photoshop I applied the following edits/filters/adjustments: 1) Levels: I increased the contrast to make the blacks darker and the light grays fade to white. 2) Filter: Poster Edges. I set it to only one level of posturization, so it turned the dark sketch lines into thick black lines and the lighter areas were faded to a single shade of gray. This was a VERY interesting image, but not quite the effect I was looking for. 3) Adjustment: Threshold. I converted everything to black. 4) Using a graphics tablet, I cleaned up a few edges, added some lines to the Indian’s hair, and just tidied things up a bit. All in all, it came out nicely. Not quite what I’m looking for, but I’m optimistic that I can get there with some more practice and experimentation. Keep watching, I’ll post some more shortly. [NOTE: The background design was just added for this online version. When it's published it will be in black & white.]