Scott Baio Mural Process

Oh, you all know I like a process post so when a couple of people asked me about this week’s title card, I couldn’t resist putting together a new process post. (Hey, it’s been a least three days since I did one!)

First, as usual the idea for Episode 79’s title card came from something we discussed on the show – this time Robert Dayton’s story about the Scott Baio mural inside the ladies washroom at a local porn theatre near where we record Sneaky Dragon. (Boy, that makes the neighbourhood around Ian’s office sound really sleazy, but it’s actually more of a hipster enclave with this anachronistic remnant of another age stuck in the middle of it. It’s for sale now and it will be kind of sad to see it go. One imagines that the store that sells jukeboxes will soon follow as the weird is replaced by the “weird with a trademark”.) Anyway, I immediately thought how great it would be to put Sneaky D in the mural with Scott Baio. Of course, because I’m lazy, my initial hope was to find a high quality photo of the mural that I could digitally alter in Photoshop and take the rest of the day off. But no-o-o-o-o, the only picture I could find was a low resolution one about as big as an amoeba. That meant I had to redraw it. Ugh.

Here’s the original photo I found:

Oh man, at least, I hope it’s the actual mural in the Fox. Wouldn’t it suck of there were two Scott Baio murals out there in two different porn theatres? Remember that trend? When everybody was painting murals of obscure sitcom actors in porn theatre washrooms? Those were the days. But I’m betting that there could only be one person who would want to paint a loving mural of Scott Baio in the ladies washroom of a rundown porno house.

It was my hope from the get-go that I would be able to place my new mural in a photograph of a bathroom so that plan was percolating in my mind as I worked. The first thing to do was draw a new picture of Scott Baio. I roughed out a picture and then added Sneaky D to get a sense of how it would work. You can see I had a bit of a false start before I got it more right. I won’t say right because I’m a terrible caricaturist. (I’m okay with this. I don’t need your pity.)

So it doesn’t really look anything like Scott Baio, but whatevs. I just drew something equivalent to Scott Baio in my normal style. Once I’d worked it out to my satisfaction, I redrew the picture to fix a few problems and I decided it would be better if I drew the characters in the circle so I could figure out placement.

Now I’ve added Sneaky D in with more details and cleaned up Baio as well. You can see that I’ve drawn a circle (using a tea saucer) so I had a better idea how the two characters would fit. Next, I had to reproduce the “Scott” lettering. Once again, I drew a circle using a saucer and then tried to fit the letters in it. Here is my very rough beginning:

The C and the O were pretty easy because I could draw them with a circle template, but I had to freehand the T and the S. The S was a bitch. The S is always a bitch to draw. (There is only one T because I could trace it for the second one.) Here is the final rough for the lettering:

Once I had that finished, it was time to take out the tracing paper and combine the drawing and the lettering.

Here is the final pencilled image all ready for inking. I did a pretty slapdash job of this drawing though. You can see the stars I needed to add to the drawing below. I actually didn’t add these until I’d finished inking so I had to do a lot of clean up in Photoshop after I scanned it. I also had to fix the original circle because it was a mess!

This is the somewhat cleaned up image. I also added some more circles in Illustrator then erased them in Photoshop so they weren’t running through the characters. As I mentioned, I also had to erase lines in some of the stars because I added them after the inking. It was a  mess. What’s odd is due to scheduling we’d recorded the episode with Robert two days after the live VanCAF show so I had about a week and half to work on this image. I worked on it in short bursts over several nights, but I seemed really unfocused. Maybe I need the hyper adrenaline of my usual Friday night and Saturday afternoon, let’s-get-this-@#$%ing-thing-done schedule to keep my mind on task.

Anyway, now it was time to colour the inked drawing, which didn’t take very long (except for my rather lame attempts to shade Baio’s chest as in the original painting and re-doing all the original ink lines as colour holds to make it look more like a painting).

Now I could have stopped there and nobody would have blamed me, but I really wanted to make it look like the original photo with the mural on the bathroom wall. So on Saturday I had to drive “Phyllis” and her pony out to an eventing lesson at an equestrian park. While waiting for her lesson to end, I took this picture of the bathroom at the park:

It’s not exactly like the bathroom in the original photo, but it is clearly a bathroom. The first thing I needed to do was get rid of the box in the bottom left hand corner. First I tried the clone stamp, then I tried copying another section of the wall and pasting it over the box, but neither worked because the shade of that corner was repeated nowhere else on the wall. Instead, I simply painted a semi-opaque grey colour over the copied section I’d pasted there. I figured that since I was going to colour it, it didn’t have to be perfect anyway. So it looked like this:

Next I had to come up with a way to colour the wall, yet leave the texture of the cinderblocks and the cracks visible. I decided it would be best to cut out the stall door so I could have a layer with just the wall visible. Using the pen tool, I created a path around the stall and door. You can see the cutting path in the image below:

I selected the cutting path by right-clicking on the path and then clicking on Make New Selection… Then I inverted the selection by pressing Shift+Ctrl +I and copied it to a new layer (Ctrl+J) where I could delete the wall and fill that space with the peculiar bluish-green colour of the theatre washroom. I added a different shade to differentiate the ceiling and I had this layer:

Here is how it looked with the original background and the new layer after reducing the opacity of the second layer somewhat:

If you look closely, you can see the texture of the bricks. (I’m all about the verisimilitude, dudes!) Next, I added the “painting” of Scott Baio and Sneaky D. You can see that I “transformed” the image using the Perspective tool in the Transform menu.

I dropped the green colour out of the “painting” so the textures would be visible as well. The three layers together looked like this:

Finally, in the original photo, there is some flare from the camera flash on the wall and on the stall door. So on a separate layer, using the brush tool and the colour white, I created a flare (albeit in a different location – and, yes, that does bug me). You can see it best here with out the mural visible.

Let’s add the mural back into the picture:

And there you have it: a fake photograph of a fake mural on the fake wall of a porn theatre bathroom.

Please comment below if you have any questions or if you have some advice on how to do anything I’ve done above better. I’m open to good advice. (Specifically: is it possible to erase one selected layer when you’re looking at a different layer? That’s something I’d like to be able to do.)