Pencil, coloured pencil and gel pens

[lark_ascends]

Scaled preview of one of the drawings:



Drawn from this photo by ex animØ on flickr. Graphite pencils


Drawn from this photo by furtivelungs at deviantart. I'm really not great at faces, so I was pretty happy with how well this did actually turn out. Coloured pencils.


My and my sis' budgies, Spike and Daffy.


Inspired by fefa_koroleva's beautiful work, I decided to try out gel pens on black paper.
Drawn from this photo by mari-mi at deviantart. Silver and gold gel pens on black paper.


Gel pens on black paper. From a photo of my own.

Comments

[randombees]

Hey, these are nice drawings!

Would you like any tips for tweaking the colors on the photos of your work? I get the sense that the colors are more vibrant in real life. :D

[lark_ascends]

Thanks.

Sure! I do some tweaking on my macbook, but probably not enough.

[randombees]

Okay! First, tell me about what program you're using, and what your process is. :D

[lark_ascends]

I use 'preview' on the mac to do basic edits. Basically I might alter the exposure, saturation or temperature (which if it's gone a particularly colour over all might help) until it looks a bit better. I do have The Gimp, but I don't tend to use it for this.

[randombees]

Hmm, I've never used Preview to do anything, but I found this tutorial about GIMP that seems pretty clear: http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/gimp_tutorial/index.html

When you level your work, initially slide the white arrow and the black arrow in so they touch the start of the 'hill' in the curve. This will cause all the grays of the paper to turn white, and all the lines to turn their darkest. After that, Hue/Saturation, Burn/Dodge tool can help you bring out any lost details or restore color quirks.

[lark_ascends]

Thanks for the suggestions.