Digital Drawing

As usual, I have been asked to design the service sheet for our church carol service. This year they have produced a separate sheet with all the words of the carols and dispensed with the purchased carol sheets which had got very tatty and didn’t contain all the ones they wanted anyway. In the past there always had to be additional words on the back of the service sheet to make up this deficiency, but this year the back sheet of the A5 booklet was blank, so I decided to put a picture on it.
This took me far longer to do than the whole of the rest of the sheet, which is always a doddle because I’ve kept all the previous versions and can use them as templates, and the front cover always remains the same, with just the date being changed.
I found a free digistamp image on the internet, of some Christmas candles:

This was approximately the sort of thing I wanted but I wanted to improve on it somewhat. I was limited because the image had to be greyscale to keep the cost of the printing down.
I opened the file in Serif DrawPlus and traced each element of the image onto a separate layer, and rendered each part with a shaded fill.

It didn’t look finished, and I hadn’t achieved the effect I wanted, so I created yet another layer and chose a pencil effect brush, and drew some sketchy outlines and some shading, which finished it off better.

This is much more the effect that I wanted; I think the dynamic lines bring the picture to life.
Tomorrow I shall convert the whole service sheet to pdf format and forward it to the person who’s arranging the printing. All done in plenty of time before the 18th December!