Thursday, June 15, 2006

Anatomy of an ATC - Angel

This is an all digital ATC card that I made for a Paper Traders swap called "Anatomy of an Angel". The theme of the swap was called Tranparencies of Life and it was hosted by Keron Lee of Australia. The theme was very open to interpretation so I chose one of my favorite subjects, angels.





I started with a painting "Autumn" by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Its really a fairy but it could pass as an angel.







I flopped her horizontally so that her posture would mimic the next graphic that I had in mind for the composition. I then layered "Autumn" over a background and erased out most of the lower left with a feathered eraser.







I added another image that I found in a google image search. Its a rosecrucian diagram I think..very alchemical looking. I positioned it over the Grimshaw figure and erased out the background using the magic wand tool and my delete key. :-) The easy way to go if you want to get rid of a background that is a solid color. I decreased the opacity of this layer a tad to make the graphic blend in a bit better.


I then created muliple transparent layers and stamped each with a custom brush. (see June 10th, 2006 entry on this blog for a lesson on making custom brushes) I always use separate layers for each element that I add so that I can reposition each layer.

The layer can be scaled down or up, rotated, color corrected , or the opacity can be changed. On some layers, if the brush was not visible enough, I'd duplicate that layer and then lock them together. This increases opacity. It also works for text that needs more "punch". Its finer looking than using "bold" which I think ruins a good font. But I digress. :-)
So when I was happy with the arrangement I used my text tool to write "Anatomy of an Angel" using a font from P22 Type Foundry called Cezanne. I rotated the text layer 90ยบ CCW. Then I flattened the layers.
Some traders don't seem to like digital cards unless there's some "real" texture to them. So before I swapped them out I added a gold embossed border to my cards.

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