color cycle (animated)

I had trouble coming up with a title for this tutorial. It isn’t about any one particular thing, really, and the title I ended up with is only partially accurate. The post was inspired by paint-by-number kits, particularly Van Gogh’s Sun Flowers and DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. I bought the Van Gogh paint-by-number kit from Amazon and was immediately taken by the idea of making my own. After all, it seems simple, right? Wouldn’t it just amount to decreasing the color set to a manageable few, grouping those colors together, and then outlining them with a stroke? Aaaaah, these schemes start off so simply in my head. I began doing this and that and then a bit more this and less of that, etc., etc., etc. To make a long story short, it was a mess! Although I didn’t come up with an actual paint-by-numbers tutorial, I did learn about some new (easy!) Photoshop techniques and I want to share them with you.

After admitting that my paint-by-number solution sucked, I finally succumbed to searching for a viable method via Google and I found some pretty cool tutorials. They varied quite a bit in their techniques:

• Gyre & Gimble (primary method: cut-out filter)
• Red Bubble (primary method: posterize)

some color combos

So, I cherry-picked the techniques I liked from each tutorial (cut-out and posterize) and then I combined them. To top it off, I added a gradient map to the result (another technique I learned from Adobe’s Support Forum) to make images like those above. Though I intended this to be a paint-by-numbers tutorial, it ended up having a mind of its own and evolved into a posterize/cut-out/gradient map Photoshop show and tell. In any case, I hope you enjoy this post!

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