| Illustrator John Kachik used Photoshop as an electronic
silkscreen press to lay screens over his vintage-inspired piece.
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Kachik started by photocopying a basic
sketch of a bodybuilder and a barbell drawn
with a graphite pencil. He copied the drawings
so the texture of the graphite would
retain its quality when brought into Photoshop
as a Grayscale scan. He then placed
scans of a piece of stipple-tone paper and
a creased and stained watercolor paper on
two separate layers to add texture, warmth,
and a vintage quality to the piece. “I wanted
it to look like an old, discarded bubble gum
wrapper or label,” Kachik explains.
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To mimic the look of a screen from an old
zipotone book, Kachik scanned in a newspaper
screen at 800% as a Grayscale TIFF and
tiled together pieces of the scan into one
large screen. “I didn’t want perfect, mechanical
dots—so I used real, once-printed
irregular dots,” Kachik says. He then created
three separate Grayscale Photoshop documents
for the screen and assigned color to
each by choosing Image > Mode > Duotone,
selecting Monotone, and clicking in the Ink 1
color field to choose colors for red, gold, and
blue screens.
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He then brought in the colored screens as
layers above the background paper and sketch
layers. In order for the bodybuilder drawing and
background to show through the screens, he set
the blending modes of all the layers to Multiply.
He decreased the Opacity of the red screen to
69% to affect the way the color interacted with
the yellow screen slightly misaligned underneath
it. The blue screen layer’s Opacity was reduced
to 75% to interact with the colors of the screens
beneath it. Then he placed the barbell sketch at
the top of the layer stack.
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He shaped the screens over the bodybuilder
by imperfectly trimming the excess around
the outlines of the bodybuilder and belt with a
combination of the Polygonal Lasso and Eraser
tools. For the blue screen that appears behind
the bodybuilder, Kachik used the Eraser tool set
to Airbrush and gradually faded the dots, creating
rounded edges at the outside of the screen in the
process. He also added to the vintage look of the
piece by adding pseudo registration marks around
the edges. He simply cut and copied slices from
each screen and placed them on their own layer
set to Multiply.
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The final image is shown at left. If you're using these techniques and need a richer or
darker color screen, simply
copy the layer, set the blending
mode to Multiply, and reduce
the Opacity until the desired
color is achieved.
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John Kachik is an illustrator based in Sykesville, MD.
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