It's cartoon time, folks!

Another little “filler” piece, just to pass the time. Not exactly Model Related Handicrafts, so let’s call it “Forum Related Handicrafts”.

Some of you may have noted in passing that I have been posting various seasonal cartoons in The Lounge, and since folks who visit this Forum tend to be interested in “how it’s done” I thought I’d give a quick explanation of how these came into existence. (Slowly and sometimes painfully is the answer).

I sometimes suspect people think I just find a suitable picture online and stick a caption or  “speech bubbles” on it. But no, they are all assembled from scratch. The process obviously involves finding suitable images and sometimes you find more suitable pics than you know what to do with, and at other times it’s quite a struggle to find a figure or object you need, sitting at approximately the right angle and with the right perspective. The required part of the image may then need to be selected and cropped out of its background and saved in a file format that will put it in a transparent frame, so it can be superimposed on a background image. (A lot of JPEG images appear to be free-standing objects but are actually contained in a white box, so again they need to be extracted and saved separately).

Picture assembly usually involves a background image, which may need to be modified in some way, with unwanted parts being digitally altered or painted over. Then the various add-on objects are imported, re-sized and repositioned. I do some of this in Photoshop Elements and other bits with PowerPoint. I know PowerPoint gets a lot of stick because of all the naff presentations people do with it, but actually it has some quite useful graphics tools that I actually find easier to use than Photoshop. Mind you, Photoshop does have one useful feature – it lets you “warp” an object to match the perspective of the background, so things that look a little awkward can be adjusted to sit more convincingly.

Both Photoshop and PowerPoint work in “layers” so objects can be brought forward or pushed back in the mix to sit in front of or behind one another. Then you have to decide which version looks prettier (Ho, ho).

Sometimes there are other things to be done, like adjusting the brightness or colour saturation of the add-ons so they blend in better and don’t look like they’re just “stuck on”.

Here are some of the components used in some recent efforts, including a couple of last-minute pieces that have just popped up in The Lounge even as we speak.

Santa’s stretch Cadillac turned out to be a nightmare, and several days in a row I sat down, had another look at it and nearly gave it up as hopeless. I won’t go into the excruciating details, but having chopped up the standard car in various ways, getting the bits to go together again with altered size and perspective was tricky. At one point, after the right side of the car had been extended with the extra door, the steering wheel and dash now appeared to be halfway down the left side of the car, where the middle row of seats would be. So I had to extract a copy of the wheel and dash as a separate file,  then “paint” them out of their original position, then re-insert them as an under-layer in the composite photo. Quite a brain-puzzler at the time but, as with those tricky moments in modelling work, it’s satisfying when something finally comes right (or close enough).

So now you know. And if you didn’t even want to know in the first place, you can go back to The Lounge and look at all the reindeer jokes.