Colour and Landscapes - a workshop in development

I love the tourism posters of the 30s.  I have been taking inspiration from well known artsists, Brian Cook, Norman Wilkinson and Tom Gillfinian and trying to decide what to do with them. Local landscapes seemed an obvious choice.

This idea came to me whilst doing my second year group project with Becky, I was producing some simple landscapes for the game that we were designing.  I want to take my own photographs and use graphics packages Photoshop and Illustrator to create digital 'screen prints'.

Here was my first trial. Very basic. This was created in Photoshop, traced a photography by hand using my wacom bamboo pen and tablet and coloured using the fill command, paint bucket and fill gradient tools.

First attempt at digital version of 30s style landscape, used in my 2nd year group project

As you can see the colours are rather basic and in very deliberate blocks, giving the impression of the landscape, rather than the detail.

Here is an example using another method, this time a local sight of Holmcombe Hill and it's tower, looming over my adopted town of Ramsbottom.

This method is again a combination of simple tools in Photoshop. I used the cutout tool in the filter gallery to simplify the image. This dilutes the detail into colour blocks, whilst retaining identifiable elements.

At the top end of the cutout options you can produce some very abstract images, which I love and am exploring in another avenue, but for this stage of the project I am keeping the landscapes recognisable.

I then adjusted the brightness, contrast and tweaked the curves and levels to exaggerate the difference in the colour blocks.

Finally I used the replace colour adjustment to give a wintery feel with some pretty pinks to the whole picture.

Alternative method using cut out filter and replace colour

I am developing a tutorial for my Media Club kids (they won't thank me for referring to them as kids) demonstrating these two different, very simple methods.  I am hoping to practice and perfect my own process of recreating those great Railway Posters.