Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Random Act Of Publicity - by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

Just received some good news this week! My illustrated short story, "Kodama," has been accepted for inclusion in Stone Bridge Press's YA fiction anthology, TOMO. Editor: Holly Thompson. Proceeds from the book will go toward teens affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011.

But now to the meat of today's post...

Hazel Mitchell, at the SCBWI Illustrator Intensive in LA,
holding a copy of the book I just purchased from her.
In honor of Random Acts Of Publicity Week, my post today focuses on a RAP about a book Hazel illustrated: TICK, TOCK, TAYLOR, written by Anastasia Suen. Here's how I created an image in Photoshop as part of today's RAP.

First, I scooped the cover image and put it on a separate layer, over the basic outline of my RAP cat:

I used a layer mask to clear the bit of cover that was going to have the cat's paw covering it. I also wanted an interesting background, so filled the bottom-most layer with a solid color:


As I continue to learn Photoshop CS5, I've been exploring its brush presets. One of my favorite libraries is the "M Brushes" preset. The cool cross-hatch texture in the background is one of the brushes from that preset:


Next, on other layers, I added the cat's coloring (with brushes from the same library) and the t-shirt, made some tweaks to fix the angle of the arm on the left.


Ta-daa!

Next week: the fabulous Fred Koehler.

Find out more about me at DebbieOhi.com.
If you're on Google+, do add yourself to my Kidlit Artist Directory.


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