|
Bring the opacity down to 50 on the layer which contains your pattern. You should now be looking at something like this partial image...
13. Make Layer 1 the active layer and take up your magic wand again, Match Mode RGB, Tolerance 30, Feather 0.
14. Click once inside a square that contains a dark pattern piece. Hold down the shift key and continue clicking on darkened squares until you have maybe 15 to 25 selected. (Don't try to select too many at one time as this creates a strain on the undo buffer and will drain your resources. Just work on a small section at a time so that you can backtrack quickly if something goes wrong. Oh... and ignore those squares with the "V" bits in them... they are not part of our pattern.)
15. Grab your flood fill tool (paint bucket), set it up as follows:
Fill Style = Solid Color
Blend Mode = Normal
Paper Texture = None
Match Mode = None
Opacity = 100
and using white as your color, click once on a selected square to fill all of the selected squares. Do not deselect.
16. Call up Blade Pro again. The settings you used on the grid should still be same, so just click OK. Do not deselect.
17. Go to Images|Effects|Black Pencil and use the same settings as previously. Do not deselect.
18. Go to Images|Effects|Drop Shadow and use these settings:
19. Deselect.
20. Repeat steps 14 thru 19, working on a small section at a time until all of the darkened squares have been crocheted. Remember that you are using three seperate filters on each selected group of white squares. Blade Pro, Black Pencil, Drop Shadow. Say it like a mantra until it drives you mad... lol! The Black Pencil effect gives just a bit more definition to the stitch with some light shading. The drop shadow, with these low settings, tends to "fluff up" the squares a tad. We don't want any real shadowing of the underlying grid since filet crochet is rather flat and one dimensional in that respect.
21. Got all your squares done?? Okay... let's give it an additional realistic touch. Drag the layer holding the black and white pattern into the trash. Click on your background layer to make it active and add a new raster layer. Turn off the visibility for Layer 1 (or whatever layer holds all your hard crochet work).
22. Open the bottomgrid.psp file and minimize it.
23. Be sure your new raster layer is the active layer and retrieve your paint bucket from wherever you left it. Set it up for a pattern again, and select bottomgrid.psp as your pattern, and flood fill the new layer.
24. Use the magic wand (set the tolerance to zero, though) and click on one of the black lines. Go to Selections|Modify|Select Similar. Don't overlook this step, as the small bezier curve I included in this pattern will not be selected otherwise.
25. Fill your selection with solid white. Give it the same Blade Pro preset and then the same Black Pencil effect. Do not use the dropshadow on this grid. Deselect. Drag the opacity slider for this layer down to 80. This grid gives us the illusion of a slip-stitch which, although subtle, is very much a part of this type of crochet. The squares which remain unworked need to be traversed by slip-stitching across them... and I have it on good authority that if you neglect to include this grid, the crochet police will raid your home in the middle of the night... confiscate all your crochet hooks... and post your photo in the local library as someone who cannot be trusted to follow rules and therefore should not be allowed to borrow books or anything else! LOL! Imagine the shame of it all!! ;-)
26. Turn off the visibility for the background layer and go to Layers|Merge|Merge Visible.
27. Click on the Background layer and flood fill it with solid black... or play around with different backgrounds.
C'est tout pour la tut, mes amis! ;-) You can colorize your crochet layer if you'd like. I used Hue 4 and Saturation 14 to achieve a very soft, natural thread colour. If you find a coloured pattern that you'd like to utilize, you can also colorize separate groups of squares while they're still selected as you go along. And if you resize it, as I did, you'll need to sharpen it afterwards. I found that the Sharpen|Sharpen filter was far too harsh and made the crochet look flat. (Just say NO to flat crochet!) Using Sharpen|Unsharp Mask works much, much better. I resized to 80% of original (using Smart Size) and then used Unsharp Mask at a Radius of 1.00, Strength 85% and Clipping 0.
Of course, your finished masterpiece will require a gorgeous frame to really show it off. Uh-oh... there goes the rest of the afternoon! lol!
If you have any questions or need help with anything regarding this tutorial, please don't hesitate to give me a shout. Thanks for hangin' in! :-)
< < Back to Part One
©2003 Just Mousing Around
| 
