Burps and Pop art

So I down around 200 odd millilitres of coke without a pause, and realise five minutes later the extreme pleasures of burping. I mean it keeps coming, and you keep enjoying it, when you don't have to stifle it... then the burps stopped, so I downed the rest of the bottle, imagining the burps to come again. They didn't. I walked around, in that expectant state, stomach uncomfortable, knees wobbly and dragged steps. Made it to the medical shop to get mosquito repellant with Extra MMR (mosquito mortality rate, how very clever) and then rapaciously burp right in front of the chemist. But that single pleasurable one was about it, I got hiccoughs after that... so... anyway... as I was not saying:





Ok the popart tutorial... Now a photo of yourself is necessary over many places on the web... The photo in the messengers, your profiles in blogger or orkut, or for signatures in forums and message boards... Or even the wallpaper on your cellphone. Just a pic gets boring, and popart is a pretty cool (to use a relevant word, groovy) way to spice up your photo, and although popart like this







may look too complicated to make, its actually pretty damn easy to pull off if you have photoshop.



There are three important facets in this kind of popart, the sketching part, which makes it look like its drawn, the coloring, and finally, the halftone (grains or dots). There are various ways to tackle each, and the different methods are listed, just pick one from each to make your own combo.



For no apparent reason, I just picked a photo of Mallika Sherawat for this tutorial. The elementary steps involve duplicating your image before you work on it to preserve the original. Don't just read, try these things out. Layers>Duplicate layer should do the trick. Once this is done, you are ready to start. The simplest popart is to use a threshold and a color.



Image>Adjustments>Threshold. Slide the bar till you get a recognizable picture, and then Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation
Click on colorise. Increase the saturation. Reduce the lightness



And the result is this:







Ok, now the dirt



Part I

Sketching



Method 1

Image>Adjustments>Threshold

Set foreground/background color to white/black

Filter>Sketch>Photocopy

Low detail, high darkness



Method 2

Filters>Stylize>Photocopy

Low detail (1-7)

High Darkness (30-50)

Then do Method 1 again



Part II

Coloring



Whatever you do, you need to play around with the transparency of the topmost layer for coloring... (layer>transparency)



Method 1

Paint the layer underneath

Reduce the transparency of the topmost layer (layer>transparency) and then use a brush to paint the required color. Nice effect, looks like its actually drawn. Exceed the boundaries a wee bit, the effect will be nice.



Method 2

Filter>Blur>Smart Blur

Full Radius, Full Threshold

Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation

Click on colorise. Increase the saturation. Reduce the lightness



Filter>Artistic>Cutout

No of Levels: Full

Edge Simplicity: 0

Edge Fidelity: Full



Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast

Increase brightness till desired image is achieved



Method 3

Bucket fill the areas enclosed by the black boundaries with the desired colors (This effect gives you the look of NFS Underground if you skip the cutout step)



Part III

Halftone



Method 1

Layer> Duplicate Layer (new file)

The picture should be replicated in a new file

Image>Mode>grayscale

Image>Mode>Bitmap

Method: Halftone Screen

Frequency (very low), I used 3 lines/cm

Shape: Any that you please!

Ok

Now import this pic as a layer back to the original image you were working on and reduce layer transparency



Method 2

Filter>Pixelate>Color Halftone

Max radius: Very low (between 4 to 8)

Leave the other settings untouched

Layer>Transparency>Around 60%



Method 3

Filter>Sketch>Halftone Pattern

again, reduce transparency




some more of em Sherawat Poparts, just to give you an idea of how it should look


Ok... Sketching: Method 2, Coloring: Method 3, Halftoning: Method 1





Sketching: Method 2, Coloring: Method 1, Halftoning: Method 1





The NFS underground effect





A note on thresholds


Now this is the integral step, and you need to do a few practice runs before you get it right. Usually, the graph shows up something like this, for a normal base image:






The spike in the middle is where the image goes from being more dark to more light. If you use the photocopying filter, the graph shows up like this:





Don't worry, slide it till you get an image anyway, although it looks wrong. If however, you colorize it, it somewhat recovers and comes back to normal, like this:






Now this is the important part, although the settings are shown here, unlike the other settings, this one depends a lot on the image for the final outcome, but there is a live preview, so you can choose the most suitable image. Have fun. And for those who hate Sherawat, here is a zombified version: