30 April 2008

F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Gears on Old Paper

After last week I took the initial gears and made them from solid gold, not is time to talk about the completely different approach, old writing on old paper, where we will work on the strokes.

So, back to the black and white gears:

[paper gears]


If we set the stroke color and unset the fill color will get something like this, with overlapping contours, he will have to get rid of:
[paper gears]


So select the gear (gears if we have more) suffering due to this unwanted overlap and convert the stroke to path:
[paper gears]


The go to another gear which covers it, duplicate, select the duplicate and the former stroke and do a difference operation:
[paper gears] [paper gears]


Repeat with all the gearc covering it until we get to something like this:
[paper gears]

Then convert all the remaining strokes to paths.

Now we want the drawing to look rough. But it has a large number of nodes, it will take quite a while to edit them manually for the desired rough look, so, as usual, I will cheat and use an automatic simplify operation (shown at an increased zoom level):
[paper gears] [paper gears] [paper gears]


Repeat for all your gears and get something like:
[paper gears]


Now define a multistop gradient for the paper - light grown/yellow for old paper or dark blues if we want to go with blueprint (I have not decided yet about the way to go).
[paper gears] [paper gears]


A multistop gradient is needed for ink too (not shown), and it has to have fitting colors but good contrast with the paper (like browns for old paper and light blue for blueprints). Apply the gradients:
[paper gears]


Then add some texture to the paper: draw a random blob with the freehand tool, will it in a color similar with the background (but slightly darker or lighter), unset the stroke, simplify if needed and blur a lot:
[paper gears] [paper gears] [paper gears]


Add some more until you are happy with the texture:
[paper gears]


The images is still too sharp for an old drawing on old paper, so we will have to soften the focus. Select all the gears, duplicate, make the duplicate darker (black), apply some blur and decrease the opacity:
[paper gears] [paper gears]


And this is all for now:
[paper gears]


I still want to tweak this design further, I am researching for an additional effect which I am not sure how to achieve (yet): I want to make the paper look like it was folded (probably a combination of random shapes and blur).

5 comments:

  1. You might want to do a very light blur on the gears and/or move from the black to a dark charcoal gray. In the final illustration the lines are so sharp and dark, it looks more like something laser printed on vellum paper than an aged illustration on aged paper.

    Fading and fuzzing the lines just slightly will make it look more like old ink on old paper, IMO.

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  2. i was playing around the other day with trying to make paper-like textures also...

    i found using the feTurbulence filter that was filtered desaturated also was an interesting effect:
    http://ryanler.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/envelope.png

    the bottom part of that is to show the filtered section under the "paper"

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  3. Thanks for posting an update. It's good to see something from start to finish.
    I was going to suggest something similar to evil greg - using the new tweak tool might allow you to get an ink-soaked-into-paper look with the jitter or roughen mode.

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  4. @Ryan: the feTurbulence looks interesting as a noise source but I don't get how to desaturate it... normal color adjustments do not work on it, is there any other filter which should I add too?

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  5. @nicu: to desaturate, i used the colour matrix filter primitive. In it there is a couple of presets, one being "saturate" which i presume is a typo, because it actually desaturates the image...

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