Oh yeah, we are making an alien now! Photo manipulation in Photoshop is fun, but this is creating art with little dots of light. This is creating life out of nothing. We started with a simple… in fact it was quite bad… sketch of a creature that existed only in our minds, scanned it into the computer, and we are bringing it to life!

Here is where we left off yesterday…

You may notice that I removed one of her short arms. It was just drawn so badly that I decided not to save it. Remember this was just a quick drawing I did as I wrote about this character. It helped me describe her and brought her to life in my own head. Here is a little trick that may seem obvious; to make a new arm, I just copied the old one and then flipped it over…

Then I rotated it a little, and made some changes and erased a few lines so it was behind the other arm. If you go way back to the very first picture of her,  you will notice that her right long arm didn’t have a hand on it either. I did the same copy, paste, flip, rotate and change a little trick on that. It is a good way to get symmetrical body parts.

Of course you could just draw them better in the first place. But I was just going for a feel of her… okay… that sounded wrong… you know what I mean. Drawing is a little tricky in Photoshop. I find that a mouse is not that good for drawing. You could get one of those stylus pen mouse things. We have one, but it is too much trouble to set up. Maybe I should try it again sometime.