This design idea comes from a WeChat group, where a classmate posted a fake principal award picture. So I wanted to try it myself and commend my classmate for their outstanding contributions to the field of pigeon studies over the past few years.
First, let's analyze the original image designed by the illustrator:
We found that the biggest difficulty in forging a similar image lies in the processing of the character image, which includes the black outline and the golden shadow inside.
Now that we have the idea, the next step is to create it. Originally, I made one using my classmate's photo, but due to copyright concerns (the Pigeon King himself is not very willing to use his portrait directly on the Internet), we used a free commercial portrait from the Pexels website as an example.
Okay, next is the stylization process. We open Snap Art and start selecting suitable painting styles. In this step, we found that Snap Art does not support PNG format images, so we first convert it to a white background JPG image using Photoshop and then import it. I made a total of three images in this process, namely the black base photo, the gray shadow photo, and the clothing outline photo.
From left to right: Clothing outline photo, black base photo, gray shadow photo
Shadow photo blending mode - Multiply, gold pattern overlay blending mode - Overlay.
After these operations, the simple imitation is completed. Since the original model has both a beard and glasses, this non-painting form of image processing may appear a bit crude. Of course, you can also choose to use Snap Art to process the outline and then use Procreate to fill in the golden shadow. But since I am clumsy, I can only rely on machine processing 2333.
After doing all this, we create a new canvas, adjust the size, fill the background with paper texture, and replicate the original image blocks and text (using the famous Avenir font, adjusting the letter spacing to fit). During this process, we need to use the color selection tool to remove the pure white color from the replicated image to highlight the texture of the bottom paper. Finally, we can get the desired effect: