Production Reflection

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Process

While looking for images of animals to rotoscope, I found this photograph of a crow, and came to the idea of making the monochrome-coloured bird to be as varied in colour as a parrot.

Process

I used the Polygonal Lasso Tool to select the bird from the image. Then, I right-clicked on the selection I had made, and in the context menu, I clicked on Save Selection. In the window that popped up, I was prompted to name the selection I wanted to save—this isn’t really important, so I named it ‘bird’.

Process

After saving the selection, I copied the bird to a new layer. Following this, I created new layer and I used the Brush tool to paint various coloured blots on top of the bird.

ProcessI went to Filter > Liquify, and in the Liquify window, I swirled around the colours with my cursor, to give it a more natural look.

Process

I changed the Blending Mode of the layer of the coloured blots to Overlay. Doing this blends the active layer with the layers below by making the active layer translucent, which in turn allow the layers below to show through.

After that, I used the Smudge tool to make the flow of the colours more natural-looking in the bird’s chest area.

ProcessTo make the colours appear better on the crow, I duplicated the layer containing the crow, and I went to Image > Adjustments > Invert to make the crow white instead of black. Then I changed the Blending Mode of the inverted crow to Overlay.

I did this because colours are presented better on white than they are on black. Now the colours are more vivid than before. Take a look at the two images below for a before-and-after.

Process

I have made the background of the image black-and-white in order to provide contrast against the rich colours of the bird. I did this by selecting the original layer (the one containing the background) and going to Adjustments > Image > Desaturate.

Process

This is the finished product: