Students Own Tutorials - Hana Tesar

Creative CV for freelance artist
I made this CV for freelance Illustration and art. I use it always when I submit my proposal for any illustration project on Guru.com where I freelance. First you have to have idea who is your audience and what kind of job you want to get. I usually create for every single job different cv depending on what they want and what I can offer. Also you have to have some pieces of your best work to show. I have been doing a lot of medical illustration - I'm lucky that this employer wants it hand drawn, not vector as most of them want. I'm also lucky that she found me on Guru and offered me the hardest job I have ever done - Skeleton and medical illustration. I became her artist and I had never attempted medical illustration before. I use all the best pieces I have done : skull, eye ball, brain, heart and I also included my crazy chicken which I painted in photoshop and a few unusual objects running around - which is a piece of my personal work. Don't forget to work on your personal projects too as I often forget due to my lack of time. Below is a tutorial of how I created the artwork.

I found a background I wanted to use, a great link for some copyright free photos is www.sxc.hu. Then I was thinking how can I organise the pictures on the page and leave a space for writing. I wrote the CV first in a word document, to have an idea how much space I needed.

I enhanced every picture in Adobe Photoshop which is the most important part. All the pictures are drawn with pencil on acid free Fabriano A4 90g sketch pad, scanned at 300dpi.

Tips and Tricks - how to chop the images from their background (Intermediate Level Photoshop)
You work most of the time with the pen tool or polygonal lasso tool (this work well with holding down ATL and graphic tablet which switches Polygonal lasso tool in to laso tool and you can freely draw with the tablet pen) this is good for quickly chopping the image from its background, make sure your anti alias is ticked (on the left top bar if polygonal lasso tool is selected).

When your selection is ready and the image is selected, Right mouse click - Layer via copy. This adds a layer above, just with your selection. At this point I convert the selection to smart objects - important!

Go to layer pallet - right click on the selection you made and choose convert to smart object (this will preserve the quality of the original selection, you can scale it up and down but the file stays the same. )

Do all the adjustments or colouration on the layers above without loosing the quality.

Right mouse click on the little half black and white circle on the bottom in layers pallet.  Create new fill of adjustment layer - Levels. Here you can do all the color changes ( Levels are the best for correct whites, mid tones and blacks of your pictures ) 
 
There is also a trick in how to separate pencil work from its background, which I used for my 'Time after Time' cover piece (as shown below). Work in CMYK color mode. Selection with channels : ( which I used for Time After Time )
- open your file in photoshop
- Select - All
- Edit - Copy
- File - New ( CMYK mode, White Background ) press OK
- go to channels palette ( Window - Channels, if you don't have them visible )
- click on Channels  - on the right side in the corner there is a little arrow pointing down with few little lines - click on it and create
- New channel ( Alpha 1, leave the setting as it is )  click OK
- with alpha channel selected go Edit - Paste
- click Load Channel as Selection ( which is the little circle made from dots in channel palette on the bottom )
- click on CMYK channels in channel palette and return to your Layer palette
- Choose Select - Inverse
- Create new Layer above and press "d" ( this sets the colour to black )
- press ALT + Delete ( this will fill your active selection with black and that's it :) )
- Select - Deselect
Now you are ready to colour or do anything with your pencil work, don't forget to convert it into smart objects.

When I do the colouration I often switch the layer to multiply mode (next to opacity in layer palette - there you can play a lot with the image), then I can colour over the existing black without covering it. Every colour on separate layer. The CV pictures were chopped with polygonal lasso tool (I have graphic tablet which makes everything easier) and changed it into hue saturation or luminosity I don't remember exactly. The background paper blended together with the images this way, simply by choosing the mode. I don't use any filters from the filter gallery as I find it too cheap looking, and don't use magic wand tool for chopping the images from its background as it looks very poor and badly done ....

For further reading I recommend Darek Lea - Creative Photoshop, fantastic book, and Computer Art Magazine - just brilliant, inspiration, tutorials and news in art.

Good luck with experimenting       
Hana Tesar