Photoshop Creative Issue

choose the colours by actually colouring my
sketch in Photoshop.

What are your favourite tools to
use in Photoshop?
Mainly the tools I use are the Magic Wand
Tool in conjunction with the Refine Edge
option. I also love using certain adjustment
layers, specifically Selective Color, Hue/
Saturation and Brightness/Contrast. For the
Little Red Boubou project, I created the
illustrations by selecting areas between the
black lines and using masks to apply my

scanned textures to the selected areas and to

the lines. Then for every area, I modified the

colour of the applied texture to get the exact

colour that I had in mind. Finally I added

shadows and highlights by darkening or

lightening the colours of my lines and textures

on specific areas.

This creative process is slightly

different to your usual, then.

What made you head in a new

direction for this project?

The style I used for the Little Red Boubou

project differs a little bit from my usual

illustrations, even if they are still similar. There

are two reasons for that: first I had a very

short amount of time to finish the illustrations

for this book, secondly as I wanted heavily

contrasted black-and-white drawings to be

able to select the areas easily, I used black ink

and continuous lines. As a result my lines are

a little bit stronger and the look is more ‘naive’

and colourful than usual, which was not a

All images © Typhaine Le Galloa

COLOURED

LINES

With this

technique it

is easy to get

punchy results

with coloured

lines, for example

the red lines on

the features of the

leopard’s head.

problem for me as I thought it was a good

match to represent an African adaptation of

Little Red Riding Hood.

Has this project changed the way

you use Photoshop?

Nothing is better than to work on a whole

project of at least 10 illustrations by applying

the same Photoshop recipe on all the

illustrations. This recipe should be compatible

with what you like to do with traditional

mediums: for example, for me it was essential

to keep the textures of watercolour pencils. I

learnt a lot during the Little Red Boubou project.

I only really mastered the software after

spending a lot of time on these 32 pages of

illustrations in Photoshop. Before that I was

mainly trying to edit my pictures to fix the loss

of colours and contrast due to the scan. Since

then I am still using traditional techniques, but

now Photoshop is an essential part of my

process to get the final atmosphere and

palette of colours that I have in mind.

DEVELOPING

TECHNIQUE

For the skies,

I enlarged my

texture as

usual but I also

stretched it

horizontally to get

a different visual.

TEXTURES

In all my

illustrations I

used scanned

watercolour

pencil textures

that I zoomed in

to for textures

with strong and

large patterns.