Portraits from Photographs

[Albacore]

I started doing this at work when customers started asking for potraits from small photo's i we did it in PS with reasonable sucess. I then thought how about doing this in AI with a decent background and it would be quicker and the resulting drawing would be more pertinent to the subject and in most cases more artistic. The drawing took longer to complete and not ecconomical to do so I thought about doing it in Xara.

This is the third one I have done in xara and they are getting quicker but to get a decent return from the customer and profit I need to get it down to 1 hour so that's why it is nearly a cartoon in style. The style needs a bit more work done to it and maybe the eyes need a bit more work but it is nearly there.

The photo starts in PS where they are very quickly Desaturated, then a duplicate layer is inverted and a blending colour dodge is done to that layer along with a gaussian blurr and then finally the levels are adjusted to the right. this only takes minutes because of shortcuts and it is then imported into Xara to be traced. the tracing is very crude on the highlights but time is money and so long as the finshed out come is nearly like the photo the customers so far have been happy. The one that I do in AI take normally twice the time that the Xara ones take although the brush styles in AI are much better to use and more convincing.

I wish from my experience when doing this is for "ClipView" not to destroy the layers as you have to save one copy of the drawing without clipview and then one with, just in case that you want to edit it still in the layers.