This design idea came from a WeChat group, where a classmate posted a forged picture of the principal receiving an award. So I wanted to try it myself and commend my classmate for their outstanding contributions to the field of pigeon studies over the past few years.
First, let's analyze the original image designed by an illustrator:
We found that the biggest difficulty in forging a similar image lies in the processing of the character image, which includes the black outline and the golden shadow inside.
Now that we have an idea, the next step is to create it. Originally, I made one using my classmate's photo, but considering copyright issues (the Pigeon King himself is not willing to use his portrait directly on the internet), we used a free commercial portrait from the Pexels website as an example.
Okay, let's move on to stylization. We open Snap Art and start selecting suitable painting styles. At this step, we found that Snap Art does not support PNG format images, so we first convert them to white background JPG images using Photoshop and then import them. I made a total of three images in this process, namely the black base photo, the gray shadow photo, and the clothing outline photo.
From left to right: Clothing outline photo, black base photo, gray shadow photo.
Choose "Multiply" blending mode for the shadow photo and "Overlay" blending mode for the golden pattern overlay.
After these operations, the simple imitation is completed. Since the original model has both a beard and glasses, this non-painting form of image processing may appear somewhat crude. Of course, you can also choose to use Snap Art to process the outline and then use Procreate to fill in the golden shadow. However, since I am not very skilled, I can only rely on machine processing 2333.
After completing these steps, we create a new canvas, adjust the size, fill the background with paper texture, and replicate the original image's color blocks and text (using the famous Avenir font, adjusting the letter spacing to fit). During this process, we need to use the color selection tool to remove the pure white color from the replicated image to highlight the paper texture at the bottom. Finally, we can achieve the desired effect: