IF - Suspense - Digital Baby Steps - Keyboard Commands

This week's prompt for Illustration Friday is "Suspense." It happens that I had this drawing that I did one night, as part of my After Hours Drawing series. That's really just stuff that I doodle when I don't have the energy to work on other things such as actual jobs, work for specific things such as cards, apps (yes, I'm working on one.) or book dummies. In other words, things that impose certain limitations.  

So, one night, after hours, I just started drawing and this is what happened. (That's a characteristic of After Hours Drawing - whatever happens happens.) To put it up today for IF, I did my usual scribbly rendering and then scanned it into Photoshop and combined it with a background color. I have some screen shots below.

This is NOT a finished piece! Eventually it will be full color. Perhaps a limited palette, but not this limited. Just keep in mind, this is only the beginning. I couldn't resist adding the light from the partially open door, hoping that it creates some suspense.  In addition to more color, I may use different textures in different layers. That's something I want to experiment with.

This shows the background color that I wanted for this piece and the scanned sketch side by side. This is all that fit on my screen, but it was enough to do the job. The background is created by going to file - new and making a blank document either the same size as the sketch or larger. (If it's larger, it can be cropped, but it must be large enough to hold the sketch, so  can't be too small.) Pick a color and drop it in with the paint bucket tool.

Then, drag the sketch onto your background and make it a multiply layer. It will blend the sketch with the background color. I LOVE this! It doesn't happen automatically, so don't panic! Just see below:

The multiply layer is created by selecting multiply in the drop down menu in the upper left of the layers palette. You can see, I selected multiply for my sketch - the sketch layer is highlighted) This blended my drawing with the blue background. And that's that!

On a little different digital note, last time, I wrote about some favorite keyboard shortcuts. My friend Barry Gott told me about something called ikey which seems like the mother of all keyboard commands. I'm still learning how it works, but Barry is a genius and super techie. When Barry speaks, I listen! So, here's ikey. Have a look! I'll be adding more friend's favorite keyboard commands in the future.

Thanks for stopping by!