I know this is way outside of my normal work, but I had to share.

I haven't been participating in the woot derby the last couple weeks for a variety of reasons. One week it was a second chance derby for a bunch of designs the editors felt should have a second chance (none of mine). One week's theme was ficticious rock bands, and this weeks theme is the 90's, neither of which grabs me. And last week was Escher, which I love, but didn't have the time to give it the attention it deserved.

So instead, I've been working on figuring out how to do color separations in Photoshop, and then turning them into halftone screens.

After many hours spent with several tutorials, this was the first attempt that looks even reasonably good. There were lots of versions that just didn't work, followed by ones that technically worked but looked bad. This one worked, and looked decent! Yay!

The choice of red car as a subject was based on the tutorial also using a red car. I wanted my attempts to look as close to the pics in the tutorial as possible. The tutorial did explain how to do multiple colors, but I stuck with just the highlights and shadows for now. Less steps, and less things to go wrong. My next attempt will have more colors.

The top image is the original photo of the car, pulled off of the internet. The bottom image is my color separation. It's only 2 colors, with the white and black converted into a halftone screen. The red is the background, as if it were printed on a red shirt.

In the end, the whole process isn't hard, so much as it involves a *lot* of steps. And if you get one step wrong early on, it messes things up all the way down the road. And since I haven't done it a lot, I don't know when I've missed a step until I get to the end and to doesn't work. After I get the whole process more memorized, then there is the skill part to work on, there are lots of steps that require judgement calls.