my guess is illistrator... easy to do there

Wow that looks good

dude its not a plug in... you have o re-draw in a draw program like illistrator or free hand

You can do it in Illustrator if you want it to be vector based so when its blown up or shrunk, it'll always keep the same dimensions and never be distorted. But I use(d) photoshop.

I find it much easier and since most the pictures I do are over 1600px, the quality is good enough for me.

that shit is tight!

Josh and PostWhore

your work is tight man. excellent. damn.

Go buy a Photoshop / illustrator or Corel book folks.
if you understood your software this stuff wouldn't be so ahh inspiring.

Nice effect but EASY to do if you know your tools. If it takes you more than 5 minutes to do it in Corel, your doing something wrong.
I'm not that handy in photoshop, but I assume the time spent should be about the same.

5 minutes?

I hope your not serious...

at least 3 hours invested in Neo, and a lot more on Niobe (considering the detail of her coat)

The process isn't hard, but time consuming if you want it to look right.

I'll post up a quick how to, gimme a few minutes

Ok, this is my best way of describing it without actually showing you. The PSD i have of neo is about 70 different layers, its a lot of colors, the less colors you do, the less "real" it looks. So i wanted to go with a lot of layers...

The original images are 1600x1200. These are just resized for the sake of our monitors..

Step1:
Pic out the picture you want, I downloaded the wallpaper of neo from thematrix.com, photoshopped Morpheous' arm onto it and a samaruai sword.
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step01.jpg

Step2:
Start an outline on a new layer and make sure this always stays as your top layer. The more outline you do, the more "coloring bookish" it looks. So keep your outlines thin and not too many
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step02.jpg

Step3:
Shadows. Its best to get the shadows out of the way first. Like Black and anything dark. Kinda gives you the basis for curves and other colors.
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step03.jpg

Step4:
From here on out its basically a lot of shading with different layers and colors, by selecting areas from the original image (i use the polygano lasso) and fill. A lot.
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step04.jpg

Step5:
When you do something like skin, you'll want to get a base color to base the rest of the colors from. Like a neutral tone I guess you can say. Chose that tone and choose the rest of the color off that.
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step05.jpg

Step6:
Continue filling it. Remember the more colors the better. Thus why Niobe is taking me forever.
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step06.jpg

Step7:
After awhile of filling, you should have something like this..
http://josh.soulcash.com/howto/step07.jpg


A couple more tips I should mention. When like shading layers, keep those on top so you don't have to be so precise when filling, you can just have the darker colors overlap those others, make sure the area is filled all the way too....

I hope this helps

mospeed - sweeet

If you could only push one button and spit out Sistine Chapel ceiling art. How nice. Even God had to hire an artist..

These are manual traces, I'm quite sure. Very good work also.