News,  Technical Tutorials

iPhone and iPad Art Tutorial – ‘The Littlest Egliid’ by Mel Harrison

2012-10-15 / 14 Comments

Many people have been in awe of Mel Harrison’s outstanding character creations and rightly so, they are incredible. Mel is now publishing a children’s book with this character and many more included.

We were desperate to find out how Mel created these characters will her iPhone and iPad and asked her as one of our valued Contributors to write a tutorial, she was more than happy to oblige. You will love this, what a way to start the week. (Foreword by Joanne Carter)

‘The littlest Egliid, the last of his kind, saw something shining in the distance, cautiously he approached and watched it for a little while. He poked it and watched some more….is it a star? Or perhaps it’s the seed everyone has been waiting for to regenerate the forest and save the planet….but no one will listen to him because he’s so small. I wonder what he will do to get their attention…

This image is part of a children’s book I am writing called The Egliid. I am getting a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I created this character so I will do my best to try and explain it”.

Step 1

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The images used were taken with an iPhone 4S, then I used the Photo transfer app to transfer them to my iPad.

Step 2

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The background of the images in this series was made from a black photo painted in using Paint FX, a layer of grunge was added in ScratchCam and a cracked ground blended in via FilterMania 2. The blending was all done in Image Blender and has a large image dimension of 3072×3072.

Step 3

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Using another image of nothing in particular I ran it through Glaze to get a texture base, this was transported into Paint FX and coloured. I took this texture “sheet” into Juxtaposer and sculpted out the character, each section was sculpted individually, saved as a stamp and used to build the character onto the previously made background.

Step 4

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Juxtaposer will drop the image dimensions down to 2048×2048 to restore the large dimension I layer the juxtaposed image over the original background in Image Blender setting the opacity to favour the juxtaposed image. I saved this image to camera roll.

Step 5

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I then took the image into Paint FX and drew the curl on the top of the little Egliid’s head.

Step 6

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I opened the image in Lenslight, where the fallen star was added.

Step 7

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I added the light leaks via Pixlr-o-matic and using the luminosity blend mode in Image Blender changed it from colour to white. I also added a dark filter in Pixlr-o-matic to add some drama.

Step 8

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Finally some brightness was added to key points in Paint FX to illuminate the character.

Mel Harrison is an Australian digital artist, iPhone photographer and writer. Her work has been shown in exhibitions around the world including the LA-MAF. She has been honoured with Artist of the Day and Artist of the Month at www.iphoneart.com. Mel is active in the IPhoneography community and is part of our sister site staff team at www.mobitog.com. You can follow Mel's work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mahoganyturtle/ and her work is a available to purchase via http://iprints.iphoneart.com/artist_studio/MahoganyTurtle As a Columnist for theappwhisperer.com, Mel will focus on digital art and collage images. Her column will be called APPart and she will be incorporating a different 'mainstream' editing app each week and will hopefully inspire you to try your hand at some APPart of your own.

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