Final Result
The main narrative of this series of images is supposed to portray the white rabbit travelling to another universe to find his tea time buddies. This is the image where he finds the mad hatter. I used the orbs to connect all of the images since he is following the orbs that lead to his friends.
Ver 1
To start off, I already had my background picture, so all I needed to do was attain the needed assets and copy them into the main image.
There are several selection methods however I thought that the drawing tool was the best method since I could lower the hardness of the tool so that smaller could be included while the background wasn't. This was especially useful here as there is a lot of foliage.
Next, I copied in a fabric design that I found while doing sketch number two which can be found here:
To make sure that it looked realistic, I used a layer mask rather than deleting the fabric. This made it easier to undo a mistake since I could just draw it back in.
Another thing that made my life a bit easier was to lower the opacity of the fabric layer so that I could see the rabbit underneath.
To make sure that the suit didn't look like 1 solid image, I added subtle shadows on the arms and underside of the rabbit. There is also a a line to make the collar seem more pronounced.
I also made a soft light layer to add some light/shadows to the asset. This will help him integrate into the scene much more since the contrast will lower.
To make the rabbit seem more interesting and detailed, I decided to add a monocle, just like the white rabbit has in the animated series. However, I wasn't able to find a monocle image that was large enough to fit with the rabbit I had chosen.
So as I selected both part of the chain and part of the glasses, I tried to be as precise as I could be by drawing as close to the line of the objects as was possible.
I I had trouble erasing all of the white space since it would look unusual.
As you can see here in this next screenshot, I added both of the previous assets. At first it looked unnatural since it looked like the chain was floating rather than being connected to the suit. Therefore, I decided to draw a small pocket, this small detail was able to hide the edge and integrate the images.
Since the rabbit was finally finished, I decided to create some side characters to set the atmosphere of the scene. I decided on some plague doctor masks due to the fact that they are normally deemed as quite gloomy just like this scene. I did a simple drawing selection and copy pasted them into the scene.
Next, to give them some sort of body I made some sort of shadows underneath the masks so that they seemed integrated and as if they weren't just floating.
After the bodies of the mask were created, I decided to work on the orbs I was going to use to create lines in the image. These are also the objects connecting all of the images together.
I originally wanted a ready made orb that I didn't have to edit, however I found that a snowball had the exact shape and shadows that I wanted. Not only that, it added a sense of realism that I wouldn't have acquired from a drawn orb.
To really give them the effect I wanted for the spheres, I added a linear dodge layer to make them seem like they were glowing. I made them blue to make them contrast with the background so that you focus on them first.
I also made them float at different altitudes to create a sense of movement. This is also achieved since the line is curved.
Finally, I got to the mad hatter. I had a lot of trouble selecting the asset from the original image. While the background was white, you could see it in the hair of the mad hatter, making him immediately look quite fake. A way to fix this was to get a low opacity brush and go over the white with a common background colour.
Making him fit into the scene was also difficult. To make it seem less obvious that he wasn't there already, I started to create some fake lighting, as if it were coming from the street light and made some shadows. I did this by creating a clipping mask and drawing the wanted colours in (light blue and dark brown) and the making the layer into a soft light rather than normal.
To further the realism I made some on the floor shadows for bother the mad hatter and the rabbit. I did this by selecting the two assets and then going onto another layer and filling in the space with a dark brown colour.
Then I flipped them vertically and rotated them so that they fit with the two posts on the sidewalk. I them created another lighter shadow behind the assets to fit in with the posts.
When creating the shadows, it felt like the balance of the image was off since the orbs were only on one side and nothing connected the rabbit and mad hatter. Therefore, I copied the orbs, remove one and then moved them to be in between the two main characters.
I was surprised to see that the clipping mask for the shadows and highlights on the rabbit so I ended up having to do that again. This time however I added some blue aswell so that the rabbit has a very subtle contrast to be noticeable.
To create a much more cohesive scene, I decided to create a layer for the sole purpose of colour correction for all of the assets. However, this layer seemed to also edit the background. to fix this I decided to put all of the layers in on folder and make the mask a clipping layer to avoid the background. This really helped since this made sure that the little colour the background had left stayed.
At the end I just made small tweaks like editing the opacity of the different masks, make the orbs lighter and making areas of the background darker so that the orbs can contrast off the ground.
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