Art: Jack Harkness and the Temple of Doom

This is the artwork "Jack Harkness and the Temple of Doom":

(This was done using Gimp 2.2.)

This was a combination of two main images.

  1. The Jack came from this picture of Jack, which I then zapped the background from (which wasn't very difficult, since it was mostly white).
  2. The background came from a photograph of a ruined temple somewhere in Asia.

So what did I do with them? I did this:

  • I applied the colour sketch technique to both Jack and the temple.
  • To get the "outline" lines on Jack, I duplicated the desaturated Jack layer, and applied Filters -> Edge-Detect -> Difference of Gaussians
    I then applied a little gaussian blur Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur to make the lines not so harsh.
    I put the layer into "Darken Only" mode, which meant that only the dark lines were applied, since the rest was white.
    Then I gave the layer a layer mask, and "painted out" the lines I didn't want (and then painted them back in if I changed my mind). I also did a little bit of touch-up with the actual lines themselves, such as fixing a gap in the bottom-of-the-sleeve line.
  • I did a lot of tweaking with the colourfulness of Jack, doing layers with layer masks to get different effects on his clothes and on his skin.
  • Because his black leather was now slightly tinged green, I made a green "wash" layer in overlay mode between the temple and Jack. The green was picked with the colour picker tool with the "sample merged" option on.
  • There was a portion of the "temple" image which seemed a bit too bright, it was catching the eye too much. So I:
    1. Made a new transparent layer above the temple
    2. Did a rectangular select (carefully placed so as to line up with parts of the temple image which had lines in them already.
    3. I feathered the selection Select -> Feather
    4. did a plasma fill Filter -> Render -> Clouds -> Plasma
    5. Desaturated the layer. Layer -> Color -> Desaturate
    6. Set the layer mode to Hard Light.
    That seemed to darken it down enough so that it blended in better with the rest of the background.
  • To get the sketch fading away at the edges, I had a new layer with a white-to-black radial gradient fill. I tweaked with the layer a bit in the "Levels" window Layer -> Colors -> Levels to have more white in the centre. Then I set the layer mode to "Divide". That "whited out" the edges so it looked more like a hand drawn sketch which didn't fill the whole area.