Scanner Darkly/Waking Life Effect Tutorial
I'm doing this in Adobe Photoshop CS. Theoretically you could do this in paint, but I'm not gonna do that. Click on any of the pictures on the page, to zoom in. If you'd like to use the picture I'm using here, click here (.jpg, 2.7MB download) to download it.
You should be able to follow along in whatever image editor you use, but one with layer capabilities makes things alot easier. So you start out with the picture you want to apply the effect to. The higher the rez, the better it'll look, once you're done with it.
1. Start off by creating a new layer. This is the layer that you'll use for the "inking." Select black as your foreground color, and pick the brush as your tool. Now it's time for some calculation. Take the size of your picture, and subtract 2. This is an 8 megapixel photo, so I got 6. (To calculate megapixels just multiply your photo's width by its height, and divide by a million) You probably don't want to use anything smaller than 3 pixels though.
2. All right. With your thick line, start by tracing the major lines of the face, and subject. The outline, cheeks, neck, jaw, shoulders, etc... Don't do the eyes, nose, or lips yet though. Also, there's no need to trace all the way around the face. Go just past where the hair meets the cheek bone. The hair will cover this up later.
3. Now we'll do the lips. I often add another layer for the eyes, lips, and nose at this point. Choose a brush just a bit smaller (I chose 4) and trace the outline of the lips.
4. You want to zoom in as far as you can, so that the line appears smooth.
5. Repeat this procedure for the nose. Here, I've turned off the picture layer to check my progress. It'll look something like this:
6. Now we come to the eyes. Eyes are very important. If you get them wrong, the picture usually turns out downright scary. Choose an even smaller brush (but not the smallest) for the eyes. Outline the white and the iris. Then do the folds of the eyelid, and any crow's feet. Again, you want a high level of zoom, to ensure a steady line.
7. Grap yet a smaller brush (probably a 1 or 2) and do the eyebrows. Just short strokes, not too many (or they'll be too bushy) in the direction that the hair is growing. If your picture is not clear enough to see individual hairs, just look at my picture. Most eyebrows grow like that.
9. Checking progress again. Repeat for the other eye.
8. Now comes the hair. There are several ways of doing this. You can outline the hair, and then paint bucket it full of color. Or you can use a big brush, and color in wide strokes. In this case however, I'm going to use a method that's quite a bit more complicated and tedious. Sorry.
10. Start off with a tiny brush (1 or 2) and follow the lines of the hair. Make really long strokes, from root to tip, of each hair. Now when I say "each" hair, I don't mean each hair. Just do enough to render the general idea of the direction in that particular area. This is pretty hard to do with a mouse, but I manage. It's times like this that make me want to buy a drawing tablet. Oh well.
11. At some point, you'll want to turn off the picture layer and add a white background layer. You can use this to check your progress, and fill in any areas that you missed.
12. Here's the part where we make it look good. This can't be done with paint. Duplicate the hair layer. Then apply a variable blur (like "gaussian blur") to the layer. Adjust the blur strength until it looks like so.
13. Next, take that same blurred layer, and colorize it, like so.
14. I ended up with this, after numerous duplication, layer blending, blurring, and color adjusting. Make sure that your final hair layer is the top layer of the composition.
15. Now it's time for some color in those rather vacant looking eyes. Create a new layer, under the inking layers, for the eye color. first use a white, and fill in the whites. Use a bit of pink for the conjuctiva, then go over the white with another color (like blue, green or brown) for the irises. Lastly, use black for the pupils. It make take a couple of tries before you get them in the right place. Switch the layer off and on, to check the placing. The pupils are key, and if you get them wrong, your subject will look cross-eyed. Lastly, you can add the little highlight in the pupils. Again, use the original picture as a reference.
16. I usually take this time to add eyelashes. Again, if your picture isn't clear enough, just use mine as a reference. That's what most of 'em look like (although for guys, they're fewer and farther inbetween.) Use one of the inking layers that doesn't have any of the eye in it. That way if you mess up, it's easy to erase and start over again.
17. Make another new layer, for the lip color, and use an appropriate shade of red to fill in the lips. Again make sure that the color layer is underneath the inking layers. This makes coloring in the lines much easier.
18. Create another new coloring layer, under the inking layers, and select a dark grey color, and a wide brush. Use this to fill in any shadows. The nostrils of the nose, the ears, under the jawline, and chin, and also around the hair line. I've turned off the hair layer in this picture so you can see my shadows.
19. Lastly, add a bottom color layer for the skin. Choose an appropriate flesh tone, and color away. Don't worry too much about staying in the lines, except where it's noticeable. The hair layer will hide most mistakes up top, and the eye, shadow, and lip layers, should all be on top of the skin layer.
20. I added this shirt color layer as an after thought. It's up to you, how far you want to take it. You could do the whole background too if you wanted to.
So there you go. That's it. It's pretty time consuming. I suppose that you could duplicate it in After Effects or Shake, but I'm not up for that kind of punishment right now. I also didn't really go for a super detailed drawing here. You can really go to whatever level you'd like, using the techniques you've learned here. Just keep in mind, that the more detail you include, the longer it's gonna take.