Winged Words

In a sudden blaze of ambition yesterday, I decided to design a logo for products to sell for Stimulated Outlet Book Reviews. It took all of five minutes messing around with the pen tool on Photoshop for me to lose my patience and break out the pencil and paper. After drawing my outline, I tried photographing it and uploading the photograph. Needless to say, that was a complete and utter failure. After several hopeless attempts at cleaning up that mess, I scrapped the whole thing in favor of scanning in the pencil drawing. Next step: fixing up the original. That involved darkening the lines so that they look like actual ink instead of faint pencil. Believe it or not, it actually took me an hour before I finally figured out which settings to use. Apparently converting to black and white and then increasing contrast works wonders! After all of this, however, my conclusion was that the image looked kind of bare... ...thus leading into my first foray into coloring with Photoshop! A combination of the magnetic lasso tool, as well as adjusted pressures, led to some improvement, though I kept getting confused about the layers and whether or not I was extending transparency to areas that should be left opaque. It was also difficult to gauge work quality objectively! Below, we have the final product, for which I have a shamefully giddy affection: And there you have it, my new Books In Flight logo. I think I'll take a break from Photoshopping now...