Illustration Friday: Song

Last Friday, I did my first Illustration Friday: Simple. I didn’t realize I was a week behind until after the fact. Alas. Here’s my second Illustration Friday picture.

It is of Levi Fuller, a very talented singer/songwriter, and he just happens to be singing his “Wedding Song” he wrote for my friend. He performed this at a show the night before their wedding. The birds are from a photo I took in Prague when I travelled there ‘all by my elf’ as my niece says. On the cover of his upcoming album, he has birds, so this reminded me of him. Plug for Levi: He puts out a song quarterly from various musicians in Seattle called “Ball of Wax“. It’s v good!

This was done in Photoshop, and I used a bunch of different methods to get this effect. The main thing is to adjust brightness and contrast in order to balance the image first; then posterize down to two colors, then use the Stamp filter. I tried using the stamp filter alone, but it comes out looking like an old photocopy. And if you have it too dark it loses the details. In the end, I kept him really big so it looked ‘louder’.