|
| William Nicholson | ||
 |
The turn of a century saw designers split into 2 camps. Those who embraced new technologies and incoporated them into their design, and those who were against the mass production of art. William Nicholson was one of 2 members of 2 brother-in-laws who became known as the beggarstaffs. He became famous in England from creating cheap commercial art that can be readily reproduced by printers at that time. Arguably the inventor of modern graphic design, his work mostly consist of silhouette paper cutouts and simple outlines. The simplistic graphics allow the illiterate passerbys to quickly take in the information without much thought. |
|
 |
For this tutorial I will use out of convenience something I just recently did using a photo from a Christmas party. The photo is courtesy of Vivian Salim, taken using a Holga medium format film camera. |
|
 |
There are many ways to create the cutout effect. I will start off with something a little simpler. We will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3. For this effect to work, the background needs to be clean, preferable a single colour. So the first problem we have here is the dark shadows created by the flash. | |
 |
So we will use a normal soft brush to sort of even out the background. TIP: Holding down the ALT (OPTION) key with the brush tool selected switches the brush to the colour sample tool. Using the colour sample tool sample an area of the green wall. |
|
 |
So now with the green sampled we can easily brush out the uneveness of the green. It doesn't have to look undistinguishable, just light enough to get rid of the shadows. | |
 |
Now that we have gotten rid of the shadows, we can create the cutout effect using Filter>Artistic>Cutout. Levels define the number of colours you allow. To create a Beggarstaff like effect, I would recommend keeping levels to a minimum. Edge simplicity reduces the amount of detail in your cutouts. The higher the number the more blockish it will become. Edge fidelity brings out details of the outlines. For this effect, this should also be kept to a minimum. |
|
 |
There you go. Mark and Faith as Paper cutouts. | |
