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These images are actually real old.... I had the idea to make a weird zebra, like with regular black stripes, but with zany colours instead of white. Or stripes that were hollow. Or weird coloured stripes on a chrome zebra. That sort of thing.
Marker, Mustek CG-8000 hand scanner, Photoshop 2-4, Kai's Power Tools 2, Fractal Design Painter 5, CorelDraw 4
All the zebras have the same stripes. First, I drew a simple line drawing of a zebra head and neck. On another piece of paper, I traced where the stripes were to go. I scanned in the outline as a reference, and the stripes to use as a mask. I also painted a third alpha channel, a shadow map of the zebra, just a black and white airbrush shading deal.
For this zebra, I copied the shadow map to the RGB channel, then hit it with that KPT zany rainbow texture, with procedural application. Then I selected the stripes, deleted them to black, then airbrushed up the highlights. There's some touching up; for example, the ear doesn't stand out from the mane very well, so I tried to shadow that up a bit.
The background is made up of three layers of 'Shop 4's
clouds and difference clouds. I made a distant, blurry, pink and blue
cloud layer, then a white-blended white cloud layer, then a 50% opaque
white-blended cloud layer.
The torn paper effect is from FDP 5. Before you
go and make something a floater, it's a good idea to copy and paste the whole
background in first. I kept floating my freehand selection and getting
this awful, garish ORANGE in my background! (And you know where that's
set? In the new file: paper colour dialogue box!! Duh!) This
is basic torn paper (I have no idea how those round holes got into the
selection), with bluish edges. The drop shadow is also an FDP effect.
I saved the image as a PSD, and opened it in 'Shop to give the plain
blue edges a lighting effect so they weren't so flat (I used the magic wand
to select the blue). I also decreased the background brightness a bit,
to make the torn out paper stand out.
This is a copy of the Rainbow Zebra file, with a different treatment. I airbrushed chrome reflections onto the zebra, then loaded up the stripes. These have a KPT texture of some kind of flame-looking thing. I think I copied the shadow map on top of everything, then used it to control the highlights and shadow... I can't remember that far back, really.
This background is made of old clouds, before I got really good at making them! The burnt edge effect is, of course, FDP 5 again. Grab a jaggy piece, float it (on top of a copy of the whole thing), apply the burn plug-in floater, fiddle with the knobs, then make a drop shadow... la la la. This got flipped in 'Shop for the Trilogy. Since the shadow was a seperate floater/layer, it could be repositioned properly, independent of the burnt floater.
For something completely new (considering it's the SAME
stripes), I used CorelDraw and traced the bitmap of the stripes. Into
this object, I put a zany fractal fill. I copied the object and
gave it a grey fill, and a lens effect of darken, offset it, and had a nifty
shadow.
The backdrop is a full-colour fill, made from some clip
art palm tree I swiped... I put some rectangles behind it for the sky
and ground, then defined it as a full-colour fill. A little interactive
tiling made it fit nicely into the rectangle. There's a second rectangle
behind that one, with a square fountain fill, trying to kinda/sorta look
like a brown frame with a highlight on the upper left.
The text used to be a different font ('til I got Weenies95
and... you don't want to hear about THAT mess!). It has a round fountain
fill of some pink-y colours, and there's a 50% darken lens thing on it's
drop-shadow copy.
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price list: This image is not currently available as a print. However, if you are interested in obtaining a print, please let me know. It will print at about 3" tall, which isn't very good. For contact details, click here.