Embarrassing Question: How'd I Do This?

[Elkaintmoose]

I was happy to see the "I did this, but I don't remember how!" thread further down—so I'm not alone. :redface: I was working on an icon design and trying to get a scribbled chalk effect. Somehow, I managed to do this:


so that I could set the blending mode to "Screen" and add a stroke, like this:


Great. Now it's a few days later, and I can't for the life of me remember how I achieved step 1, up there.

Some notes:

• The original foreground figure was solid black. I'm pretty sure it was always some kind of solid color.
• I was working with filters, and I'm pretty sure I was aiming for the "Angled Strokes" filter. But I don't know how I would have applied it to a solid color to get that effect.
• I'm pretty sure I didn't use channels, or anything crazy like that.
• I'm pretty sure there was no pattern fill or masking involved.
• In my .psd, the layer is just that—a layer. No effects or anything beyond the white stroke applied after the fact.

I must have thought that whatever I ended up doing was so simple and obvious that I wouldn't forget it...and here I am. I'd be grateful if someone could reverse engineer this for me, or at least give me an idea of how to produce a similar effect—whether it's exactly the way I did it the first time, or not!

Thanks!

 

[IamSam]

The only way I was able to affect a solid color layer with any decent results was by adding some noise before I tried the filters.

 

[iDad]

What comes to mind to me is you may have added the filter >Render>"Fibers" then something along textures some where along the line, i could be way off or spot on......if luck has anything to do with it........I'm wrong lol

 

[Elkaintmoose]

Thanks for the responses, guys! IamSam, you're right of course—the filters need something to grab on to, so I've been messing around with noise. iDad, I forgot the "Fibers" were there until you mentioned them, so I'm pretty sure I didn't use them the first time around! (They look kind of cool though, but not the effect I'm going for.)

The closest I could come is something like this, now:


That's with a Film Grain filter added to solid black first (with the grain jacked all the way up) and then a Smudge Stick filter on top, layer set to Screen. It'll do in a pinch, I suppose.

Looking more closely at my original, though, it seems like there's only really three filters—Angled Strokes, Colored Pencil, and Crosshatch—that do strokes on an angle going both directions. I'm guessing I used one of those, probably, but I have no idea how I got the strokes themselves to be so wide. :sad:

 

[Elkaintmoose]

Oh—at least I've gotten smart enough to be using smart filters this time around!

 

[ibclare]

Actually, if you use the sketch filters, they are black and white and some of them will work on a solid color. I did this first with graphic pen, then again with charcoal which now had something to grab onto.

And yeah, I was going to recommend making your layer a smart object (same happens with smart filters). Believe me, you are not the only one to forget steps. I label my layers now and use smart objects whenever I can, till I know what I want. Even then, sometimes I keep them in a PS document because it's an effect I likely wouldn't remember. So here is my cross-hatched black bunny rabbit!



You may have used any number of filters after one of the B&W.Here's with graphic pen, followed by angled strokes. I had to rasterize the layer for this one it turns out as the angled stroke didn't see the pen, at least not in the filter window (duplicate your layer if you need to do that so you won't forget.