FX Kitchen

[Jabberwocky]

Did you develop easy-to-use techniques to achieve special FX in illustration and animation? Discuss your tricks of the trade here!

Transparent Ghosts

There must be millions of easy ways to create luminous, transparent ghosts in PhotoShop and this is my favourite way to do it.

You need: a pencil, white drawing paper, an orange crayon, black ink, a scanner, PC and PhotoShop.

1. Make a pencil sketch of your ghost on white drawing paper.
2. Apply shading using the orange crayon.
3. Trace the outlines in black ink.
4. Scan the drawing and import it into PhotoShop.
5. Invert the colours.
4. Open your background picture and add the the inverted ghost picture on a new layer.
5. Optional: play around with the ghost layer's brightness and contrast a little.
6. Set the ghost layer property to 'Lighten'.
7. Create another layer and copy and paste your ghost layer into it. Also set this layer's property to 'Lighten'.
8. Blur the first ghost layer and enhance its brightness and/or contrast to create a glow around the topmost ghost layer.

Easy as pie. I like the organic look the crayon shading gives to the whole motif.