For this assignment called Cartoon You (worth 3 and a half stars), we had to render a cartoon version of ourselves. This gave me the chance to make myself (and my dogs) superheros because, to be honest I do not lead an interesting life. So let me introduce you to my alter-ego: FIREBLOOD!
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As a young child, a girl named Samantha was abandoned by her parents. As she traveled the country side she found refuge in a traveling circus where a Master knife thrower named Shabazz took her in and raised her as his own. As the years rolled on, and the circus moved from town to town, Shabazz taught his daughter to master the art of throwing knives. Samantha was close with all the circus animals, but none more so than two mixed breed canines that no one else wanted. One night when the circus was camped on the outskirts of Washington DC, Samantha and her two canine friends decided to go on a walking tour away from the circus. Unbeknownst to them, local thugs decided to attack the circus to steal exotic animals for sale. the thugs were confronted by Shabazz who defended the animals and other circus workers with all the fury of a protective father. As Samantha and her dogs returned to the circus they found it under attack from thugs who were also burning everything in site. Samantha searched desperately for Shabazz, eventually finding him near a burning tent full of cleaning supplies and other cleaning materials. As she and the dogs attempted to pull Shabazz to safety, the tent exploded, sending chemicals in all directions covering her and her dogs. Samantha had never felt such pain, every part of her body seemed to be on fire, her last memory before passing out was seeing her dogs laying on the ground surrounded by a mysterious glow. Samantha remained unconscious for several days in a local hospital. When she awoke, she learned of the death of her adopted father and mentor. Not knowing how to react, she fled the hospital and returned to where the remains of the circus were. Finding Shabazz’s knives, she began to throw them as a means of dealing with rage, guilt, and grief. As she threw the knives , she noticed that for some reason that when the hit target they would burst into flame. It was at this time that her two trusty canines also had found their way back to the circus. They too have been affected by the explosion. Both seem to have the ability to communicate with Samantha telekinetically. She learned that one could shoot heat wives out of his eyes and she named him InfraRed. The other had gained the ability to see UltraViolet rays to aid the location into seeing missing objects or people. Samantha renamed herself FireBlade and with her two canine friends set out to seek justice against those who have destroyed her home and killed her adoptive father.
(Disclaimer: Yeah none of this happened to me in real life.)
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Okay, so I could drone on and on about my superhero abilities (or lack there of), I really want to explain how I brought this character to life by Photoshop. At first, I drew out my little superhero and her sidekicks and proceeded to scan it into Photoshop CS2 ( it’s outdated, I know).
I’m going to list out the steps to using Photoshop with coloring in my picture
Photoshop steps to coloring it in:
1.) To darken the black outline I went to Image> Adjustments>Levels. A slider is shown, and you either slide it right for the black to appear darker or left for it to appear more faint.
2.) After that is done, I than went to the Channels panel and took out all of the white by pressing Delete and Control+D in the first Background layer, this allows the image to be transparent.
3.) Then I adjusted the image mode from gray scale to RGB (to enable me to color it in) by Image> Mode> RGB.
4.) I then created a new layer and renamed it “skin” and did this for every detail of the picture and so on. With each layer the image can be colored with a brush tool without affecting the other layers.
