Meet Ataraxes (DD4, Chapter Two, pages 34-37)

In which Uncle Nikos* returns a generous gesture made long ago, Alexandra meets a horse, and her dad makes a thoughtless joke.

(All the posts containing finished pages are sorted under the "DD4" tag!)

*Continuing the theme of "Tony Definitely Knows All His Characters' Names," as I was posting this, I noticed Uncle Nikos was called "Nico" on this page. Add this to the list of things to check on a copy-editing pass.

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Speaking of names, I did a little switcheroo this week. We previously established that Alexandra and Katerina had given each other the nicknames of "Kite" and "Owl," respectively. I went back and reversed those nicknames, so now Alexandra is "Owl" and Katerina is "Kite." On the pages I was working-on this week, the nicknames are used heavily and it just sounded backwards. There was no good reason to have it arranged the previous way, and regardless this way just makes more sense. I have not gone back and updated the old Patreon posts with the original arrangement, though (I'm not even sure I can).

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A Photoshop trick! I'm sharing this for the benefit of Chris Schweizer, who was talking about texture issues over on a recent Patreon post. It's the…

HIGH-PASS TEXTURE TRICK.

When I made my Delilah Dirk art prints, I added a bit of "texture" on top to subtly remediate the digital feeling of the artwork. It must be effective, because at conventions I have many times been asked, "how did you make that artwork? Must be gouache, right?" No, my friend, it's all digital, plus a little texture overlay.

The demo images I post below might be hard to decipher, just thanks to the way Patreon includes inline images. Hopefully everything makes sense regardless.

Digital art can feel sterile. It's not an obvious thing, just something you can "feel." So, like a lot of artists-working-digitally, I burn extra calories to try to "scuff up" my digital artwork. Out of the box, digital artwork comes "perfect"—for example, by default, any area you fill with solid colour will be a mathematically pure field of uninterrupted colour from edge to edge. Natural media does not do that, and you might argue you don't want it to do that, even if you're painting a wall. Digital artists spend a lot of time looking for digital brushes that fake the messiness and fuzz inherent to natural media. We also overlay textures scanned from real life. That's what this technique does, and what I like best about it is that it does not greatly alter the colour or value of the image beneath. Plus, it's flexible.

Let's start with our digital artwork. In this example, you can see areas like the foliage in the bottom-left where I've worked to introduce some roughness, but there are still big solid areas of colour, like the gully or the foreground characters or the roofs on the right. Those areas will most clearly show the texture we apply. For the sake of demonstration, we've copied this image to a single layer (as you can see on the right).

Below, I've pasted in a paper texture that I found on Unsplash, as a layer above our artwork.

It's a good texture—it does what we want, and the brightness is pretty consistent across the image. That's not super important for this technique (as we'll see later—and that's another reason I like this method), but still, we know we've got a good starting point.

If I simply set this layer to "Overlay" (or any other blend mode), you'll see it ruins all our colours. I don't want that.

With that layer selected, run the "High Pass" filter. It's in Filter > Other > High Pass…

It's true for most of life, and it's true here: the easiest way to see what's going on is to fiddle with the slider.

I don't know why this filter is called "High Pass" and I don't know what sort of math is going on. What I do know is that this filter seems to isolate the "texturiness" of an image and deliver it in a neutral-grey package.

When we apply the filter and set the texture layer to "Overlay," we get…

… a subtle effect. You can probably best see the change in the foreground figures.

Because High Pass gives us an image centred on middle-grey, and the Overlay blend mode seems to treat middle-grey as transparent, we get an effect that applies the feel of the texture image without changing the colour much.

If the effect is too subtle, you can always crank the contrast of the texture image to increase its strength (using the Brightness/Contrast adjustment, or Curves, or Levels, like I've done here)…

As long as you keep the middle grey right in the middle, your image should maintain its appearance.

If you want to get a better feel for how High Pass works, give it a shot with some different source images. The texture here is very coarse-grained, and the photo is clearly brighter in the centre than at the edges.

Still, we get useful results (for a certain definition of "useful"). The brightness falloff is eliminated, leaving us with some general stoniness. It's not what I want for this purpose, but I'm sure you can imagine how this might be useful.

Why stop there, though? Take an even more challenging source image…

…and see what you get.

Ick.

But you see what's going on. The High Pass filter in combination with the Overlay blend mode is super useful.

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Colour keeps on colourin'. Last weekend I was feeling itchy (a different itch from the one above; I got all sorts of itches, I got itches they haven't even invented names for yet), but it was the weekend, so I didn't want to "work." Instead, I started putting some pieces together for Chapter Three, and it felt great. Sketching out story points I wanted to hit. Even managed to sneak in some misdirects and some jokes. Itch scratched. Very satisfying.

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Everyone be lovely to each other,

TC