Maarten Kleyne, a freelance graphic designer from the Netherlands, feels music. Kleyne believes wholeheartedly that music is a key element in the creation of his final product. Inspired by the works of Steven Wilson and Lasse Hoile, his portfolio is filled with images including cd packaging, posters and collaboration artwork. Recently, WMC Fest alum Maarten cranked up his stereo, picked up his camera and created some texture packs for Go Media’s Arsenal. We are so proud to add his texture packs into our resource library.

We’ve asked Maarten to create a tutorial based on these textures, in order to demonstrate how you might like to apply them.

— Heather, GMZ Editor

Thanks for the introduction Heather and hey everyone! A while back I was wearing my crazy ear-to-ear grin the entire day, because the lovely people from Go Media asked me if I was interested in doing “some stuff” for them again. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of everything Go Media so I obviously said yes.

The first parts of my work have recently launched on Go Media’s Arsenal as the two texture packs: “Excluded Rough Grunge” and “Etched Into Dark”. Now – like the introduction said – I’d like to show you one way to apply these in a design through a quick and simple-to-follow tutorial. There are many other ways you can utilize the textures we’ll be using. This tutorial simply highlights one of those; a way I personally use textures quite often when creating a design.

Note: If you want to follow along with this tutorial, you will need to purchase the new packs. If you don’t you will probably still get something out of the tutorial, because I’ll try to keep it general. You will, however, get the best results from using textures from the set(s). Grab the “Excluded Rough Grunge” and “Etched Into Dark” texture packs while they’re still hot!

For this tutorial I chose to go for a 12 inch vinyl cover format. I’m truly stoked to see the vinyl record make something of a comeback, if only for the bigger canvas space we designers have! Now, back on-topic: In order to keep a focus on the texture usage, we’ll be creating an abstract – perhaps somewhat psychedelic – front cover. Here’s a preview of the final design we’ll be creating in this tutorial:

Good to know: Throughout this tutorial you can click on most of the images to enlarge them.

We’ll take our time and go through this step by step. Don’t worry, I’ve kept it a simple-to-follow tutorial. (I just use a lot of words, sorry. It really is simple though.) There’s a whooping total of 10 steps we’ll go through.

Some steps only cover the essential basics because I advocate experimentation, I want you to go beyond just following the steps if you don’t mind. Just try and experiment with the things that’ll pass along and I’m sure you’ll get a truly amazing and unique design because of it.

Feeling reluctant to experiment? You can still create the same thing by following the steps. I would, however, like to emphasize that you should try and experiment with things to create something different. It’s one of the best ways to learn, in my opinion.

Ok, so here it goes:

Step 1: Set up your Photoshop document

Open Adobe Photoshop. I’m using version CS6, but I’m sure any version will do for this tutorial. Now go to File > New and setup your new vinyl sleeve document with the following dimensions: 12½ x 12½ inch on a 300 DPI resolution. The ½ inch is just some safety bleed space I’m keeping. You can use CMYK or RGB color mode for now. I find RGB easier to work with at first, you can always convert it to CMYK at a later point. If you go to print that’s obviously something you shouldn’t forget.

Step 2: Purchase and download one or both new packs

If you haven’t already, take a minute to purchase and download the texture packs we’ll be using from Go Media’s Arsenal. Download the “Excluded Rough Grunge” and/or “Etched Into Dark” packs. We’ll use both, so in order to get the best results I’d advise you to get both too. You can skip this step if you already have some textures you want to use. However, this tutorial is meant to show you a way to apply those from the Arsenal.

The benefit of using the premade textures from the Arsenal is that it saves you time and can help you achieve professional results. I frequently use textures myself.  Basically, there’s not a single design that I make without the use of textures. Sometimes I’ll use textures in a very subtle way and sometimes quite heavily to form a complete design. That first case will be the thing I will highlight in this tutorial; the subtle addition of textures. What you’ll hopefully come to see is that the vinyl sleeve we’re making couldn’t go without those subtle additions. They’re essential.

Step 3: Create a ‘foundation’

Before we actually start using textures we’ll need to make a basic ‘foundation’, or ‘composition’ if you will. First, fill the background with a color of your liking. I chose to go for a darker greenish (#5f7463) color.

Next, place or paste a photo/texture of clouds on a new layer and have it fill the entire canvas. Then use the filter: Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates > Polar to Rectangular (yes you can actually find a use for this).

Place or paste the same original photo/texture of clouds on another new layer. This time flip it a 180 degrees before applying “Polar Coordinates”.

Set the blending modes of these two cloud layers to: Overlay.

Step 4: Add the “Excluded Rough Grunge” textures

In this step I’ve used “Excluded Rough Grunge” textures 7 and 13. Place them into the document and have them fill the entire canvas. Add texture 7 first and set its blending mode to: Screen.

This is something I often do with greyscale/black and white images. It only pops the whites. This way we quickly start adding roughness to the artwork.

Add texture 13, canvas filling and blending mode set to Screen as well. Duplicate the texture 13 layer and rotate it 180 degrees. Perhaps move these 3 layers around a bit to find a suitable spot for the white rough spots. Add other/more textures if you feel like your design needs them.

Step 5: Bring in another color

Next, add a contrast color, something truly opposite from the green you have chosen. I used some orange colored clouds. Don’t worry, this color will not be seen later. The point of that will become obvious.

Add this color in whatever way you prefer, just make sure it’s not a solid color. It has to have a bit more variation to it. A good choices here could be to use water color, lens flare or colorized clouds textures. Or you can go mad with a brush yourself. Just make sure it has some dynamics to it. Don’t overthink it though, because like I said: it’ll be used in such a way that the colors itself will not be shown.

Place this new color layer on top of the others and set its blending mode to: Difference. (Doing this will directly show you why the color did not appear)

Step 6: Add the first “Etched Into Dark” textures

In this step I’ve used “Etched Into Dark” textures: 1 and 10. Place them into the document and have them fill the entire canvas. Add texture 1 first, invert its colors by pressing CTRL/CMD+I or by going to Image > Adjustments > Invert. After that set its blending mode to “Overlay” and its opacity to 30%.

Now add texture 10 and invert that as well (CTRL/CMD+I). Set its blending mode to “Divide” and its opacity to 35%.

Try experimenting with other/more textures and opacity levels to see which result you like best.

Now we’re going to add a ton of minor details by placing texture 1 all over the canvas, multiple times. See those little dotted spots on this texture? Add this texture with inverted colors to your document again. Set its blending mode to: Overlay.

Add a layer mask to it and brush away all the white parts until only those dotted spots show.  In order to make it blend into the background well, remove all the white stuff surrounding it. You can also try using different opacity levels.

Now scale it down a large bit to make those spots turn into little dots, or stars if you will. I call them “sparks,” and I’ve added them about 25 times all over the canvas.

Step 7: Transform the ‘foundation’ to several blocks

Ok, so now we have quite a nice ‘foundation’, right? Let’s copy it around and transform it into “something more”. Merge a copy of all visible layers into a new layer by pressing: Ctrl/CMD+Alt+Shift+E.

Now you have a new layer that’s an exact copy of what you’ve (visibly) made so far. Resize that layer to about 80% of the canvas size by pressing CTRL/CMD+T and changing the width to 80% at the top menu bar. Be sure to check the chain icon to have the transform maintain the aspect ratio. After that set the blending mode of this layer to: Exclusion. (Yes, this can also turn out pretty neat for a change. Right?)

Duplicate this newest layer (CTRL/CMD+J). Transform the duplicated layer to 80% of its original size as well. Re-select the original block layer, the one you made before this newest one. Now make a selection of the duplicated layer by holding CTRL and pressing on it in the layers panel. (Still following? I do hope so.)

Invert the selection (CTRL/CMD+I) and add a layer mask to the original block layer (that you should’ve selected). This should cutout the duplication layer from the original.

Now invert the colors of the duplicated layer by (selecting it and) pressing CTRL/CMD+I.

Go through this process a few times. Duplicate the duplication, cutout a part of it that’s smaller and invert it or not. Why “or not”? Well, sometimes the non-inverted results look better. I’ll leave that up to you to judge.

While going through this process be sure to rearrange the duplicated blocks here and there. Or not. Also, don’t cutout all the blocks. Keep some of them entirely visible. You can also try and delete the first duplication after you’ve cut it from the original. Then, you can duplicate the cutout version and re-size it as you see fit. Also, try different percentages to decrease the layers with.

There are plenty of ways to go here, all resulting in different compositions. Play with it, experiment!

Step 8: Add even more “Etched Into Dark” textures

Remember those spots/stars/sparks/whatever we added back in step 6? Well, if you like things “rich with details”; add a whole bunch more. Add them on top of all the rest though. So not inside the basic composition, but on top of the block copies. By doing so you’ll enhance the blocks themselves some more as well.

Here’s about 25 more of them added, however subtle they may be:

Step 9: Add some final touches

Most of the time I use adjustment layers to add a certain “final touch” to a design. In this case I added three to enhance the artwork an extra bit. The adjustment layers I added were: “Curves”, “Gradient Map” and “Vibrance”. See the image below for the settings I used.

Now, add some text to it in whatever way and font you see fit. It will be a vinyl cover after all! Of course you don’t have to do this. When you’ve done that (or not) and you deem the design ready, do one last thing. This is something I always do to bump up the sharpness of a sleeve and to make all the little details pop out just a wee bit more. In print that might be lost a bit, which is exactly the reason why I do the following:

Merge a copy of all visible layers into a new layer by pressing: Ctrl/CMD+Alt+Shift+E. Use the filter: Filter > Other > High Pass with a radius of 5,0 (or any other value). Set the blending mode of this layer to “Overlay” and change the opacity to something more of your liking. I changed it to 50%. Try experimenting with this little technique. Try different radius values and opacity levels.

Step 10: Present it

To help place this vinyl sleeve into context, try creating a mockup for it in order to make it look like a physical sleeve. You can easily do this via Go Media’s vinyl record mockup templates or their online mockup creation tool at MockupEverything.com!

Creating a mockup preview is an awesome way of presenting your design for a lot of reasons not stated here. It could even help you persuade clients about a design. It gives them an idea of how their product will look like as a real-world product, in this case the vinyl sleeve.

So what should you use, templates or the web tool? It’s a personal decision, yes. On one hand, the vinyl record mockup templates will give you a (near) print-ready image. You could print it out and show it to a client while meeting. If you’re sending the preview over via email or a website then http://mockupeverything.com/ is probably best for web-ready presentation. It also keeps the file size lower. Clients might like that. It saves them some space, and makes sure it won’t max out their inbox quotas (and yours!).

In case you don’t know how to use Mockup Everything or the templates, Go Media has put some neat demo material together on how to use Mockup Everything.

Mocking up the artwork we just made – in my case – results into this:

That’s it, you’re done!

You should now have applied some quick techniques while using the textures from the new “Excluded Rough Grunge” and “Etched Into Dark” texture packs to create an abstract 12 inch vinyl sleeve.

Hopefully this tutorial was simple to follow, helpful and even inspirational. Aside from that, I hope the textures will prove of great use to you in many designs. If you create(d) your own sleeves, or something else, using these textures, I’d love to see it. I’m very curious to find out and see how you apply them, so feel free to share those designs. There’s actually a special Go Media place for that!

Show off your results

On the Arsenal Facebook Page, you can post the images you created using Arsenal vectors, textures, fonts, etc.  Please show me how you’ve used these products in the real world. It’s not often that we – as in Go Media – see the work you create with Arsenal products, so take this as a call to action to share it with us on the Facebook page.

For even more exposure, you can post your image in the GoMedia User Showcase on Flickr and/or comment on this tutorial below and link us to it!

Thanks for your attention and time! It’s much appreciated.

— Maarten

The post Tutorial: Creating an abstract vinyl sleeve with graphic textures appeared first on GoMediaZine.

You can buy one of these stickers at our web store for only $1.00.

Step 1: Sketches!

Way back when I started WMC Fest I used the phrase “defy the hand you’re dealt” quite a bit. I wanted to bring that back this year. A couple years ago Brandon Rike created an image for WMC that featured a hand stuck with two arrows. It’s a clever way of illustrating the idea behind the phrase. I wanted to expand upon that and combine it with images of friendship, togetherness, and community. Those are frequent ideas people have when they think about WMC. I started sketching and I came up with a pair of holding hands with a sword through them. You know, like we’re fighting this struggle together!

Step 2: Photoshop Prep

Since this artwork is going to be used in lots of ways, I created my Photoshop document at 18″ x 24″ at 300 DPI.  Why didn’t I use Illustrator you ask?  Just personal preference mainly. This design could have been done in either program to be honest. Since we are setting up the files for CMYK sticker printing, I chose the CMYK color mode. Once I got my new document set up, I copied and pasted my sketch in the document and sized it accordingly.

Step 3: Gathering References

Before I start illustrating, I need to find a reference image for my holding hands. While my sketch is OK, I want the proportions to be accurate. I asked Bill to shoot a photo of my wife and I holding hands. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I want to at least get the pose correct so I can manipulate and illustrate it in Photoshop to my liking. Here is our reference photo:

Step 4: Blocking it Out

After I placed my reference photo into my document, I rotated it and cut out just the arms and hands. The rest of the photo is unnecessary. I also went ahead and blocked in some additional reference like perfect circles, real fonts, starburst lines, and framing for the die-cut sticker.

Step 5: Start Illustrating

I reduced the opacity on my reference to something like 25% so I could start drawing on top to create the illustration. I use my Ye Ole Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and my brush settings are below. There are better drawing tablets out there, but this has served me well since 2006!

Step 6: Hand Lettering

Once my outlines are created, it’s time to start drawing the type. Now it took me many tries to get the letters correct for “Defy the Hand You’re Dealt.” My sketch itself wasn’t detailed enough so I had to improvise a lot. I knew I wanted “defy the hand” on the left arm and “you’re dealt” on the right arm. It was just a matter of making the letters fit! It was a lot of trial and error. Some tips for your own lettering would be to block in the letters first. Try a rough draft and get the letters in there how you want. Then you can turn that layer’s opacity down and draw it again over top while being more creative with the letter forms. Since I don’t have a very steady hand (often a little jittery from coffee and anxiety) my letter forms are not perfect. They’re a little wobbly, which is ok considering my entire design will be slightly imperfect.

The rest of the lettering was easier because I had a font to base it off of. For the words Cleveland, I set my reference type up with ITC Caslon and warped the type and got it into place. Then I drew over top of it my own custom version of it. For the dates, I loosely based my letters on the font, I drew it in rather quickly. Check it out:

Step 7: Shading and Stippling

Once the drawing was complete, I printed it out and used a good old fashioned light box. I placed my outlined drawing down first, then placed a blank sheet of paper directly on top. The light box allowed me to see through the paper so I can have precise detail when stipple shading. I used a set of fine-detail Micron pens. There is no shortcut to stipple shading, believe me I’ve tried!  I actually tried using my Wacom tablet to do this, but I didn’t get as natural and consistent results. So I went analog for this! To be honest, stipple shading is much easier using Micron pens and doing it on real paper than trying to do it digitally. My intention was to scan my shading into Photoshop onto a different layer. Then I could do whatever I wanted with it!

One trick to note: I did a separate scan for any stippling that would be “highlights” or “distressing” on my image. For example I did the stipple shading on my text on its own piece of paper and scanned it separately. That way I could change its color easier. I did the same for all the abstract dots that fill the background. In the end those were going to be lighter than the background, but it is still nice to have it on its own layer.

Step 8: Coloring!

Now that I had my outlines and shading complete, it’s time to fill it with color! I knew I wanted to go with my tried and true WMC Fest color palette. With my outlines and shading layers on top, I made a new layer underneath everything for each element. I started with the left arm first and colored it with the WMC pink color. Then I made a new layer and started coloring the right arm an orange color. By having the outlines on a layer above your colors, all you have to do is get close and color between the lines. It doesn’t matter what kind of brush you use, I’m just painting in solid colors. To make sure I’m using the same consistent colors throughout the design, I use “color overlay” layer style on each layer.

Also, since I made my background dark, notice how I changed the colors of “we are weapons of mass creation” and “until the end” to something brighter. Also, take a look at how I colored the little flag in the middle and the rays shooting out from the center. I just selected those layers and changed the “color overlay” setting to the color I wanted. No additional coloring needed.

Here is what our design looks like without any outlines on top.

And here is our finished design when we turn back on the shading and outline layers. Note: you might see some subtle distressing on the type. What I did for that was duplicating some of my stipple shading layers and placing them strategically on top of the type. Since the shading layers are the same color as the background, I was able to achieve a slightly distressed look.

Step 9: Prep for Die-Cut Sticker Printing!

The design is done! Now I just need to send it to print! But before that I had to make sure I was adhering to the specs that Sticker Robot calls for on their website. They actually screen print their stickers, but use a CMYK simulated process print. They literally screen print tiny dots of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black to get the exact colors in your design. So all I had to do was send them a high res CMYK .tif file and they did the rest. No complicated color separation work for me!

The trickiest part in setting this up for print was creating the die-cut layer. This was just a single color outline that on a separate layer that tells the printer where to cut the sticker out from the background. Since we aren’t going for traditional square-shaped stickers here, you need to specify the shape of your sticker!

It’s pretty easy. See below:

One thing to note was that there should be at least a 1/8″ safety area separation from your artwork to your die-cut line, and an additional 1/8″ bleed  area beyond your die-cut line. This will ensure your sticker has enough room to move around slightly on the press.

Another cool thing with Sticker Robot is they are one of the few sticker printers that allow you to print a grayscale design on the back of your sticker! To set this up with my custom shape sticker, I mirrored my sticker shape horizontally and designed the sticker back. I used a collage background I designed for the festival last year as my background and added our website URL. The only catch is the design had to be black and white. Check it out:

Step 10: Print up the Stickers!

The design was sent off to Sticker Robot and here’s a few photos they took of the sticker printing process, from film to packaging:

Film for the black plate.

Film is printed for each color. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. The film will be used to expose the screens.

The film is exposed.

A bright light is used to expose the film through the emulsion to the silkscreen itself. Each color will have it’s own screen.

Silkscreen Sticker Printing

A squeegee pushes ink through the screen onto the vinyl substrate, one color at a time, one sheet at a time.

a close up of cyan ink on the squeegee

Cyan and Magenta Ink

The cyan and magenta ink have been laid down. Next will be yellow, then black and finally 3 coats of clear UV protective ink.

Silkscreen Quality Ink

Silkscreen ink is notoriously thick and durable, typically 10-20 times thicker than digital ink. This is magenta:

Doesn’t really LOOK like bright magenta we know does it?

Magenta, Cyan and Yellow

The basic colors are coming together… we’re just missing the final color, black.

Black ink is laid down…

Now it’s starting to look like a sticker!

Sticker Diecutting

This is a tedious process, where each sticker sheet is literally cut one at a time – a truly custom sticker. See the video below that shows the process on creating die cut stickers.

Sticker Packaging!

Here are the final stickers. WMC here we come!

this is what a couple thousand custom die cut WMC stickers look like…

Conclusion

So there you have it, that was how I created the artwork for the 2013 Weapons of Mass Creation Fest and how the stickers were created. You can get your own screen printed, die-cut vinyl stickers created with your designs through Sticker Robot. If you want to attend the upcoming WMC Fest and see a ton of great bands, speakers, and designers, tickets go on sale soon at http://wmcfest.com.

A simulated time-lapse of the illustration

The post Tutorial: How to Design and Print Custom Silk Screen Die-Cut Stickers appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Fonts Used:

Boston Traffic

Birth of a Nation

Brushes Used:

Watercolor Splatters

Introduction

Last year, I was commissioned to create a poster/flyer for a heavy rock venue in the UK. The instructions I got were that they wanted something “edgy” and “hardcore”. Punk rock artwork is something that I typically do and I had created similar images for bands in the past, so it was the perfect project for my particular skillset.

Original thumbnail sketch

The Ink Stage

I started the project with a few thumbnail sketches of a man in a mask surrounded by various surreal and bloody elements. The band had just released a record called the Nightwatchman and I wanted to create my image based on this plague era image of a masked man.  I always produce my illustration projects in this manner; creating the rough layout and concept idea before jumping headlong into any ink drawing. It helps me to cement the idea in my mind before I start any inkwork. I have little concern over “how good my thumbnails look.” I merely need to put some ideas down on paper. In fact, I don’t even use a pencil to sketch and create most of my thumbnails in biro on whatever bit of paper I have handy!

Reference sheet created for the project that includes pictures of my own hands and ear!

The next step in my process is to gather all the reference materials I need. Because I barely do any pencil sketching apart from a very basic outline, I rely on solid reference materials. Some of these I find online and some I create myself (an iPhone is a seriously useful tool for taking reference shots)

Finished inked artwork

The reason why I don’t pencil sketch is because I like to ink on a clean canvas without the distraction of pencil marks. This makes the need for good reference more important and I always have the copies of my reference materials in constant view. To ink my artwork, I use three kinds of ink pens; a Paper Mate Flair pen, a medium Sharpie, and a Pilot Fineliner for the finishing details.

Illustrating directly in pen creates a particularly “energetic” style.  The fact that you are forced to edit and rethink the composition as you go is very liberating; if I make a mistake and I have to adapt the artwork to incorporate the mistake. The errors you make become as much a part of the illustration as the intentional ink lines.  It also generates the thick, black, and “dirty” style that I like.

The Digital Paint Stage

After creating my Photoshop canvas as an 8.5”x11”mini-poster (300dpi in CMYK mode), I scanned, dropped, and resized my ink drawing onto my Photoshop canvas. 

Once the scanned image was on my artboard I used my curves menu to consolidate the black and white in the layer and get rid of any loose grey pencil lines and uneven black (insure that the channel is set to CMYK and use the settings below as reference.)

The next step was to knock-out the white in my black layer.  I used my eyedropper tool to sample the white in this layer. I then went to select>color range and brought up my color range menu. To select all the white in this layer, I used the fuzziness toggle bar to ensure that all the white areas in this layer were selected.

After okaying my color selection, I deleted the selected white from my black layer.

The next step in the process was to start painting the piece. For this project I used a pack of watercolor splatter brushes (see top of article) – adding them to my default wet brush menu. I love this brush set that very closely mimics a loose watercolor paint style.  I also find the wet ink brushes particularly useful for digital painting in a very natural paint style.

I used a limited color palette of yellows, pinks, blues and browns to create my image; using the lightest to darkest tones first, and gradually moving into the central face image. Each major color layer was separated, starting with my “yellow layer”. Once my yellow layer was created, I used a selection of my watercolor splatter brushes to add random splatter shapes. I set my brush opacity to 70% to mimic a more “watery” effect

The painting process I use is very “free” and “casual” I separate each color layer and try to put colors down as fast as possible without thinking about it too much. The watercolor splatter brushes are ideal for building this type of loose paint texture. I ensured that each color layer was set at least to 50% opacity in this artwork and built realistic textures by turning the opacity down on particular brush strokes.

As well as using the watercolor splatters, I built texture using various wet brush effects to add splatter details in each individual layer.

To finish the background portion of my digital painting, I added a very opaque white layer (27%) and brushed in some white to tone down some of the harsher paint areas and knock-out the darker shades in the central character area.

For the main mask and face image, I created a new layer and painted my central character.

Once the central character was painted and the white highlights added, I wanted to add some finishing touches of dripping ink to complete the illustration. After creating a new layer, I drew some basic lines with a wet brush.

I selected these lines with my magic wand and using the warp tool (edit>transform>warp) bent and curved them to mimic the flow of dripping lines.

I then created a new layer called “small drips” and using the same technique as before for individual lines, drew and warped thinner lines to finish the paint project.

The Copy and Info Design

The big challenge in this particular project was the amount of copy they required on the poster; the client’s intent was to use the artwork as both mini-posters and flyers and they were very adamant on the copy elements they wanted to include.

With this in mind, I figured that I’d create a simple layout that compartmentalized all the copy elements in the head and foot of the artwork.

After re-sizing my artwork to free some space up in the head and foot of the piece, I created a new group and added a new layer. In that layer I drew a simple square with my polygonal lasso tool.

I then simply flooded the marqueed area with a solid black using my bucket fill tool to create a cut-out “punk-rock” style graphic.

I created a new text layer and used the font Boston Traffic to give my copy that stenciled punk rock vibe – laying the copy element inside the cut out shape.

The other font I used in this design was Birth of a Hero to further the destroyed and distorted look. After creating a new layer, I then continued this design approach by creating another cut-out shape with my polygonal lasso tool.

Again, I flooded this shape in black with my bucket fill tool. I then copied and flipped this same shape (edit>transform>flip horizontal>flip vertical) and placed it below my copyline.

I then added new text layers to finish off my header copy.

After creating a new layer, I repeated the process of drawing a shape with my polygonal lasso tool and bucket-filling with black. With this particular shape, I went back to my polygonal lasso tool to draw and delete a section from the top of my shape.

I then added new copy layers using my stencil font.

Using the band font styles I was supplied, I added new layers and built a text treatment in the lower left of my design.

I then copy and pasted the cut-out layers from the design header and used them in the footer copy to add some design synergy.

To complete my punk rock layout and to create some extra-footer space, I added a new layer to create a border around my design. Using the polygonal lasso tool again, I drew a cut and distorted shape around my design.

With my selection still active I then flooded the border by first inverting my selection (shift+ctrl+i) and then using my bucket fill to make it a solid black.

To complete my design, I added the remaining copy to the foot of my layout.

The post Illustrate & Design an Alternative Gig Poster in Photoshop appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Website: www.petemaric.com // 3D animation demo reels: www.vimeo.com/petemaric

Let’s get started!

As always, it’s a pleasure working with Go Media! I was excited to create his illustration for their headquarters exterior renovations, and my main goal was to make it look as good as possible.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the process for manipulating photographs, compositing 3D elements using Cinema 4D, establishing perspective grids, and using elements of the existing photo to create an accurate illustration.

Step 1: Fix the Photograph

Drag guides next to the building walls, double click the background layer. Edit > Transform > Skew. Drag the corners of the image using the skew function until the walls are lined up with the vertical guides. Flatten image. Use the crop tool to resize the canvas, dragging the handles past the edge of the image to the desired aspect ration/composition. Save image.

Step 2: Create 3D Elements

In Cinema 4D, create a new material and import the corrected photo inside the color channel, uncheck ‘specular’. Create a background object and place the new material on the background. Now the photo should be visible in the perspective viewport. If the photo looks disproportionate, too long or too narrow, you’ll have to match up the output size of your file with the aspect ratio of the photograph. To do this, open the render settings and background material so you have both windows open next to one another. In the material editor, color tab, the resolution size is right under the imported photo. Type these numbers into the render settings output width and height.

Step 3: Create the Bike Racks

To create the Go Go Go bike rack, start with a spline text object and type in the letter ‘G’ using Frutinger font. In the front view trace the center of the ‘G’ with a Bezier spline. Next create a profile with a circle spline, then drop the Bezier and profile splines into a sweep nurbs object. Change the ‘G’ text spine to an ‘O’ and repeat the same process. Group the ‘G’ and ‘O’ into a null object, then duplicate using a Mograph cloner to create three ‘Go’ bike racks.

Step 4: Compositing

To composite the bike rack into background, add a floor plane and use the grid in Cinema 4D as a guide to match the floor plane and ‘Go Go Go’ bike rack to the perspective of the photo.  Add the background material onto the floor plane and use a frontal projection. Right click on the floor plane > Cinema 4D tags > Compositing Tag. Inside the compositing tag, check ‘Compositing Background’ so the floor plane is not visible in the final render. Add a camera, right click the camera > Cinema 4D Tags > Protection Tag.

Step 5: Light the 3D scene.

Create two omni lights; one for the main light source with hard shadows turned on and the second as a fill light without shadows, and position them into place. Use the photograph to determine where the light source is coming from, this is where the main light source should be placed (top right of photo). In Photoshop, pick the color of the light (sky) using the eyedropper tool and enter the RGB values for both of the omni lights colors in Cinema 4D. Additionally, use a sky object with an HDRI material for reflections on the bike rack.

Step 6: Render the Cinema 4D Scene

Open the render settings, make sure the output size matches the resolution of the photo. Click effects to add a Cel Renderer effect. Check ‘Outline’ with edge color set to black and background color set to white. Specify a save path and render the line drawing.

Next, create a multi-pass render. In the render settings, check ‘multi-pass’, then ‘add image layers’ with the multi-pass button. Turn on Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion via the effects tab. Check Save > Multi-Pass Image > Check ‘Multi-layer File’ > specify a save path, name your file > hit render.

Step 7: Establish the Perspective Grid

Since the perspectives in photographs are usually not 100% accurate, it is important to establish a perspective grid to work off of prior to creating the final line drawing.

In Photoshop, create two new layers; one layer filled with white and opacity set to 50% and a new layer for a rough perspective grid. On the perspective grid layer, choose a red color and start laying out the perspective grid using the line tool. First establish the horizon line which should be at approximately 5’-6” above the ground (5’-6” is the average person’s eye level). If there are not any people in the photograph, you can use other elements to approximate this height such as doors (6’-8” average height) to get as close as possible to 5’-6”.

The next step is to find the vanishing points, where the perspective lines converge. In this illustration, based on a 2-point perspective, one vanishing point would be on the left side (as shown in the illustration below) and other point on the right, way off of the canvas and not visible in this illustration.

Once the horizon line and vanishing points are established, draw in some general perspective lines for important architectural elements such as building lines and top and bottom of windows. Continue to block in the new elements like signage and awning.

Step 8: Create a Final Line Drawing

Open the cel render created in Cinema 4D > Select All (Command A) > Copy (Command C) > Paste (Command V) into the illustration file. To create the rest of the line drawing, use 4 different line weights all on separate layers; 3pt, 2pt, 1pt, and an additional 1pt w/ 50% opacity. Start by drawing with the heaviest line (3pt) on the bottom of the building and bottom of sidewalk. The 2 pt line can be used for the building outline, 1pt line for interior details like windows and doors, and thin line for corbels/crown, garage door, and background trees.

When creating the line drawing, we can take a little bit of creative liberty from the existing site conditions. For instance, in the existing photograph, the telephone pole by the corner of the building is slanted and blocking the new awning. Let’s straighten this so it’s completely vertical and move it over to the right a few inches so it does not block the new awning. Additionally, we can slim down the foreground telephone pole and move the street names down so they are visible in the illustration.

Remember, we are trying to create an idealized representation of this building. If a few elements need to be shifted around for the sake of clarity, feel free to exercise your creative license. Just make sure to run these changes by your client and get their approval prior to proceeding to the final rendering.

Step 9: Establish a Color Scheme

Use the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to select a brick color from the existing photograph. Launch the website www.kuler.adobe.com, input the brick color’s RGB values to create a custom scheme, then play around until you come up with a good looking color palette.

For this illustration, I started with the color of the existing brick, played around with Adobe Kuler, then experimented with different sky gradients in Photoshop until I came up with a scheme that worked for this building.

Step 11: Set Selections

Before adding color to the illustration, set selections for important architectural elements. Use the pen tool to draw a path around the building > Command + click the path in the path palette to activate the selection >  Select > Save Selection > name the selection ‘building’ > Hit OK. This will create a new channel in the channels palette. Repeat this process for the windows, go bike rack, and foreground telephone pole.

Step 12: Render the Illustration

Start the rendering by creating a custom gradient using the blue color from the color scheme with a yellowy/orange color. Create a new layer, set it to multiply blend mode, and drag the gradient from top to bottom to create the basic color for the sky. When rendering, starting with the sky color is a good idea because this sets the mood for the entire illustration. Next, add a layer mask to the gradient > command/click the ‘building’ selection in the channels palette > paint away the building, but let some of the color on top and bottom bleed into the building.

Next, create additional layers for the sidewalk and street, set blending mode to multiply, pick colors from the existing photo, paint in street and sidewalk.

Step 13: Render the Windows

Window Color: Duplicate the sky gradient layer > Layer > Layer Mask > Delete, and rename the layer to ‘windows’. Create a new layer mask in the layers palette > Command/Click the windows selection in the channels palette > Select > Inverse > use a large brush and paint away everything, leaving just the color for the windows. Duplicate the windows layer and reduce the opacity to around 50%.

Window Reflections: Open a photograph of a cityscape to be used for the window reflections > Select all (Command A) > Copy (Command V). Jump over to the illustration file > Command/Click the ‘windows’ channel > Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into. This will paste the photo into the window selection. Click the window layer > Edit > Transform > Skew > manipulate the pasted photo until it somewhat matches the perspective of the illustration. Add a 4pt gaussion blur to the photo and reduce the opacity to around 40%.

Window Light Rays: Create a new layer > use the pen tool to draw some light rays > fill with an off white/yellow color > add a layer mask > mask out all areas leaving the light rays only in the windows.

Step 14: Render the Brick

For the building, we’ll use as much of the existing photograph as possible. Duplicate the background photograph > add a watercolor filter (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor) > and drag the layer to the top of the layer stack. Add a layer mask > activate the building selection > Inverse the selection > paint away everything except the brick. Activate the window selection > mask out the window area to reveal the rendered windows from the previous step.

Step 15: Create a Brick Pattern

On the duplicated background layer, select a portion of brick using the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Create a new file at 11×17 inches, drag the brick selection in to the new file. Use the skew transform tool and align the top and bottom so they are horizontal, not slanted. Duplicate this layer to create a consistent brick pattern.

Next, create a new layer and draw grout lines using the line tool in Photoshop.

Step 16: Fix the Inconsistent Brick Pattern

Flatten the new brick and grout pattern > Select All (Command A) > Copy (Command C) > jump over to the illustration document and paste the brick for the front of the building. Use Edit > Transform > Skew to match the new brick pattern to the perspective of the illustration > mask away the areas for the windows, doors, telephone pole, and signage. Repeat this process for the corner of the building and left side.

Find a brick pattern on www.cgtextures.com and use this texture to render the building on the far right side.

Step 17: Add Background Trees

Duplicate the original brick layer (the one with the watercolor filter applied) > Mask out everything except the background trees, cars, and grass > set the layer to ‘Multiply’ blend mode > Reduce opacity to 90%. Fix any blotchy grass areas with the clone stamp tool. Duplicate this layer > flip horizontal > move to right side of illustration > mask out unwanted areas to create the right side tree.

Tip: Keeping all of the elements of the illustration on separate layers will give you complete control over the final look of the finished piece.

Step 18: Render the Go Bike Rack

Open the multi-pass file that was rendered from Cinema 4D. Double click the ‘diffuse’ layer > drag all layers into a group > name the group ‘Go Bike Rack Render’ > drag the entire group into the illustration file. Mask out each multi-pass layer individually and place the group into position.

Step 19: Render the Telephone Poles & Signage

For the telephone poles, use the background photo with a watercolor filter applied, mask out each telephone pole individually and keep all poles on separate layers. For the ‘Lorain’ & ‘W.45 St’ signs, use the text tool in Photoshop and skew each word into position.

For the ‘Go Media’ main sign, use the original reference image and cut/paste the sign into the illustration. Use Edit > Transform > Skew to match the perspective of the illustration.

To create the front awning, add a new layer, set it’s blending mode to multiply and paint in the black part of the awning. Copy/paste the Go Media logo mark from Adobe Illustrator into Photoshop. Use Edit > Transform > Skew to match the perspective of the illustration. Create the address in Photoshop using the text tool.

Step 20: Add People and Cars to Populate the Illustration

Turn on the perspective grid that was drawn prior to creating the final line drawing. Open your people and cars stock files > add watercolor filter to each file > place into illustration. Tip: Make sure that the eyes of every person are lined up with the horizon line.

For this illustration, stock files were used from www.realworldimagery.com and www.doschdesign.com.

Step 21: Add Shadows

Turn off all layers except the final line drawing and entourage (people & car). Create a new layer and manually paint in the shadows using a hard brush and a cool grey color. Set the shadow layers blend mode to multiply. In this illustration, the light source would be coming from the upper right.

Step 22: Final Touches

Street Reflections: Duplicate the original photograph > flip vertical > move down so the building is reflected in the street > add a gaussian blur > mask out everything except the building > reduce the opacity to 18%.

Birds: Use a custom brush > turn on scattering in the brush palette > choose a blue color from the sky > turn layer to multiply > paint in a group of birds.

Highlights: Create a new layer > use the line tool with a 1pt line > paint highlights on the right side of all architectural geometry.

Light Bursts: Create a new layer > set blending mode to overlay > pick a yellow color > paint with a soft brush over the front of the building > reduce the opacity to 60%. Create a new layer set to overlay and paint with an orange color on both right and left sides of the illustration.

Border: Fill a new layer with a dark blue color set to multiply blend mode > mask out the center of the layer.

Texture: Drop a watercolor paper texture on top of the entire illustration and turn the blend mode to multiply.

Step 23: Revisions

One thing that you should always anticipate when doing illustration work are client requested revisions. This is a very important thing to keep in mind when setting up your working files. Although assigning each line weight and all aspects of the rendering to it’s own separate layer may be a little bit more time-consuming up front, it pays off when you have to go back and revise your files. Tips: Keep everything on a separate layer, organize your layers into groups, and name all layers.

A few of the revisions to this illustration were to replace the side brick with a painted grey color, change Go bike rack to a brushed metal finish, and add clouds and a hot spot in the sky behind the building.

Change brick to grey: First turn off the new brick pattern in Photoshop to reveal the existing grey brick color. Next, use the clone stamp tool to touch up any wires, unwanted poles, and grass/weeds growing on the bottom of the building.

Change bike rack to a brushed metal finish: Open the Cinema 4D file and replace the Go bike rack yellow material with a stainless steel found in the content browser. Re-render the multi-pass file and replace the existing yellow color in the illustration with the new stainless steel.

Step 24: The final illustration!

Pour yourself a coffee warmer, you’re done!

The post Creating an Architectural Illustration Using Reference Photography appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Earlier this year I was commissioned to come up with a series of character illustrations for Cohort Pictures new film project; ‘The Northern Mist‘, a suspense horror set during the Roman occupation of Briton. The illustrations would be used to help the rest of the creative team cast the roles for the film, aid in costume design and provide a bit of promotional material to drum up interest from investors and audiences. It was a great chance to really flex my creative muscles and get into some good ol’fashioned doodling. My favourite piece to come out of this one was what I nicknamed the Lady Briton sketch, so I decided to run a quick step by step tutorial for anyone interested in how I took this illustration through from brief to final concept.

The Brief

So the brief for this character went something like this (and this is me paraphrasing pretty extensively)-

“she’s a feisty female Briton, easily equal to her male counterparts, she get’s captured early on in the film so it’s important to try and get her fighting spirit across in the design as much as possible. Also- she is the only female in a movie full of dudes, so she really needs to not be a troll.”

After a bit of pleading, Patrick (the director working on the film) also sent me through this rough sketch he’d put together. It makes such a difference getting some rough input from a client as it means I have a starting point- even the crudest stick man helps me to get a result closer to what they originally envisioned. Anyway – from this, I gathered she needed to be in pretty light armour, probably leather or cloth and covered in dirt. Nice.

The Concept

The next step is getting a rough sketch together. My initial sketches are always pretty awful (I think I drew this one whilst on a bus in Spain?), but the point of them is very much like the concept Patrick sent me: to quickly get an idea across. If you spend any massive length of time on them, then (if you’re like me) you’ll resent any changes that need to be made, at the end of the day: time is money after all. In this version, Patrick could see I’d gone for a cloth wrap that showed off more skin in a way that wasn’t too obviously sexual, and made the hair very loose, long and straggly. I also gave her two swords, but Patrick felt that a crude sword and shield might work better, so we went with that.

The developed sketch turned out like this. I tried to stay aware that whilst this character needed to be feral and wild, she also had to be quite attractive in her own way. To keep that appeal in there, I pretty much sketched her naked outline and started adding clothes after so as to keep that core feminine silhouette to the design.

Inking

Once that got approved I moved onto inking- I ink right on top of my pencils, but I always make sure to have a scanned copy at a decent resolution just in case I slip up. A lot of top inkers recommend brushes to help you get a good line weight into your artwork, this can make your drawings a lot more dynamic and it really helps to give a sense of depth. Originally I just used digital inking via my Wacom tablet, but at my first comic con in Boston, a few editors from DC comics tore my portfolio apart, saying I had great talent but I really needed to use brushes to ink my work. Since then I’ve tried my best to use brushes, but as with all things it’s easier said than done and I ended up ruining a few sketches with spilt ink pots and the like. Now I’ve found a happy medium in the Pentel Brush Pen- which is what it sounds like; a pen with a brush nib. I think it’s designed for Chinese calligraphy or something, but to my mind, there is no better pen out there for inking your artworks (at least for the major lines anyway).

So now my inks are nailed down, it’s time to erase the pencil underneath and get the inks scanned into Photoshop. I use the Levels Tool (Ctrl+L) to try and clean up my image a bit and get rid of any paper grain. Basically I just move the black and white cursors a little closer to the centre until I’m happy with the definition I’m getting. It’s useful to zoom right in here to make sure I don’t have any pencil trails still knocking about. A trick I sometimes also do (but not for this piece) is run my linework through a Live Trace in Illustrator, then just save it as a PDF and open it back up in Photoshop. This can really help smooth out my lines and can make a huge difference if I’m going for that ultra polished look.

Colours

For colour I generally duplicate my line layer and set the top one to multiply. For the lower level I go to Select > Colour Range and choose black to select all the lines. Then Select > Modify > Contract and contract by one pixel. Now I invert the selection and delete. This means that the lower layer (which will become my colour layer) has slightly thinner lines than my top layer. This way I can just use the paint bucket tool on my lower level to quickly fill the areas I need with colour. The downside of this is that the lines on the lower layer are now very jagged, but fear not- that top layer is still perfect and will keep the ultra smooth lines. Smart.

Shading wise I do love my gradient tool, but I’m trying to broaden my horizons and so, with that in mind, for this piece I decided to use Copic Markers. Now I’m no pro with these things yet, but I’ve seen some amazing artwork from guys like Adam Hughes and Mahmud Asrar, so I figure it’s well worth my time getting to know them. They’re basically watercolours in a pen minus the mess (are you seeing a pattern here?). Seeing as I wanted this piece to be really gritty, I figured it didn’t matter too much if I wasn’t perfect yet as it’d probably add to the effect I was trying to achieve anyway.

So here’s how I work- I go back to my inks in Photoshop and place a ‘screen’ layer over them and fill it with Non Photo Blue (#A4DDED – thank me later), this changes all my inks to a special type of blue that is really tough for scanners to pick up (meaning the lines won’t show up as much when I scan it back in and I’ll just have my sexy Copic shading). I print this out and then start going over it with the Copics. I only use grey as I already have my basic colours in Photoshop. Copics have two types of grey- warm and cool. Warm is generally for skin and ‘warm’ things, and cool for clothes and ‘cool’ things (duh!), however, for this character I really wanted to make her as pale and cold as us Brits really are and so I swapped them over, using cool greys for the skin and warm greys for the clothes. This contrasts well with the olive skinned Romans I illustrated later.

So the technique I use is just to start with my lightest colour and keep adding until I’m happy. I apply each colour a few times to get really slight gradient differences and then switch up a pen for more defined shadow and light sections. Another cool tip is don’t worry about going outside the lines- we have our perfect inks saved on Photoshop now, so if needs be we can always use that as a mask to clean things up.

Some other gadgets I have are these Sepia pens. Again, these come in warm and cool greys. They’re not quite as washy as the copics but they have a much finer nib and are great for detail.

I use these for any sections that need real precise details like on the leather strips or strongly defined shadow. They’re great for hair as well.

Finally I have a couple of white ink pens for highlighting any areas. Generally I like to do this digitally as these inks can run a bit, but sometimes it can be helpful to get the whites in whilst I’m ‘in the zone’ and am pretty familiar with the illustration and lighting etc…

Now for the fun part; get the Copics scanned in and throw them into Photoshop.

I grey-scale them up with Ctrl+Shift+U to get rid of any colours that have shown up (or not if I like the effect, I call it as I see it depending on the illustration).

I put this layer above my colour layer (but below my smooth ink layer) and set it to multiply. What I’m left with is my digital colour mixed perfectly with my Copic shading. Sweet.

Finishing Touches

Now is the time to take a good look over the illustration. I often notice some bits I want to be darker or lighter. Not to worry though, I just hide the Copic layer and start editing my original colour layer. I wanted the eyes much darker and I think I wanted the clothes to cast more of a shadow too, so all I did was highlight those sections and darkened them with either the Lightness Bar on the Hue/Saturation Panel (Ctrl+U), or with the Gradient tool set to black.

Likewise I wanted to brighten up a few sections, like on the sword, so I did the same thing but with white. When I’m creating a glow or a shine, I make sure to do it on a new level above my smooth inks, stuff like this really helps blend a work of art and brings a piece together.

I know what you’re thinking- “this chick is way too clean, where’s all the mud we were promised?”. I know, and I’m way ahead of you. I have this great texture in stock from the Go Media Arsenal Grime Set 2 pack, I think it’s actually concrete, but it works really well for adding a natural, dirty looking texture to things. Normally when I’m working with textures I like to desaturate them so they taken on the colours of whatever layers I apply them to, but in this case I thought the bluey grey colour worked pretty well (having flashbacks to Braveheart!) so I decided to keep it as is.

To apply the mud effect I simply throw it on above the colour layer, delete any part that isn’t over the skin and set the layer to multiply- this ensures that all the dark bits of the texture stay dark whilst the light bits show through the skin colour underneath. After that it’s just a case of playing with the opacity to get the muddiness to a level I’m happy with, I think I opted for around 50% opacity in this piece. Another cool trick I do here to add a bit of depth and volume is to select the erase tool and a really soft brush with a low opacity and just go to work erasing bits of the mud texture on the parts of the skin that would be either naturally lighter or catch the light (since the mud layer is set to multiply, and only the dark bits are showing through, erasing them will make that area lighter). In this case I erased around the shoulder and hips, as well as on the top of the thigh to make those areas seem a bit more rounded and curved.

Now the brief asked for a character illustration and didn’t really mention anything about backgrounds, but I work to the Bill Beachy mantra of “under promise and over deliver” so whilst not going overboard I am going to try and produce a background that’ll help set the tone for this illustration. The basis for the background is very simple. Another texture from Go Media’s Arsenal, this time from the Rust 3 set with a blue tint and a black gradient coming in from above. I’ve also included just the hint of a pattern from the tribal vector pack in order to make that background a bit more dynamic. Also since the illustration is for a movie called ‘The Northern Mist’ I figured it’s probably a safe bet to put some mist in there too. This is basically created on a layer above the background (but behind the character) by using some of the sexy Smoke and Cloud textures from the Arsenal. I use a few of these mixed together and set the layers to ‘screen’ (removing any blacks from the texture and just showing the white misty goodness), this gives a sense of volume to the mist in a very authentic (and quick!) way.

To add a bit of depth and to create a foreground, I duplicated the mist layer and moved it above the character illustration to give the appearance that my Lady Briton was stood amongst the mist rather than in-front of it. I also added a bit of light in the top left corner to help show off a bit of light direction and some cheeky dust particles to make the light look a bit more dynamic and to add extra depth. One last cool little trick I did here was to put all the character layers in a group (Ctrl+G) and then apply a gradient mask to that group from the ground up, effectively fading out her feet. The result of which made her look as though her feet were disappearing into the mist, but still allowed me to keep the mist fairly fine.

So there it is, my finished Lady Briton illustration. Patrick and the guys from Cohort Pictures were really thrilled with how this, and the other illustrations turned out. In fact, they even hired me again right away to produce a short comic book in lieu of the traditional storyboards, so that they could use it as a marketing tool for the film!

The post Some Like it Dirty: Comic Book Inking and Coloring Tutorial appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Introduction

One of our clients Disciple Clothing needed a “logo” and business card designed for a ministry they are a part of. The Ashish Mubarak Ministries to be exact. They sent me their current business card along with the illustration they are using as their “logo.”

Wow! That’s technically an illustration and not a logo. As an illustration, it’s gnarly 90s gold and obviously in need of an update. Lauren Kusant from Disciple recognized this and asked me to simplify this into a logo, modernize it and add the word “Revivalist” to it. But in my professional opinion, if I reduced this entire scene into a a logo (what is and what isn’t a logo), it would ultimately lose all the different messages its trying to communicate. There’s a lot going on here!

Sidenote: If you’re interested, I suggest reading the article A Logo is Not a Brand.

You can’t fit a flaming sword, a bible, mother Earth, a dove, a scroll, and some stalks of wheat in what is traditionally called a logo. Sure you could take ALL of those elements and identify its core message and communicate that single message with a single mark. Sometimes when I do this, the client often feels that it’s too simple and too far removed from their vision. It loses some sort of wow factor. Now, a logo is meant to be a placeholder for a brand. A simple icon or wordmark that represents the brand that can be resized and repurposed for any application you can think of. It should be easy to spot, easy to recognize and easy to reproduce. Sometimes, clients will incorrectly ask for a logo, when what they really mean is “a cool looking graphic design that represents them.”

I once had a client ask for five different “logos” for their apparel line. What!? After talking more with them, they really wanted five different t-shirt designs. Specifically, five different typographic t-shirt designs. In other words, cool ways of writing their name mixed with other graphics.

So how was I going to tackle this project?  I felt the best solution would be to maintain the integrity of the elements but simplify the illustration entirely into more basic shapes and iconic forms. I decided to go with a thick line art style. It won’t be a “logo” per-say, but it will still be a simple and iconic design that can be used on a variety of applications to represent the ministry. So without further ado, let’s get into the design process!

TIP: For this style, stick with ONE line weight for a uniform look. We aren’t going for “realistic” here. Don’t over-illustrate. Simplify and keep things spaced evenly.

Step One: The Sword

Since we’re aiming for iconic and simple, always start with basic shapes and add detail from there. If you start going crazy with the pen tool, you’ll have a harder time making things “perfect”. You’ll see what I mean later. For the sword, I started with a box and used my pen tool to add a point. Then I used my Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) to select the three points at the tip of the sword. To make sure they are evenly spaced and my midpoint is exactly in the middle, I used the align tool “Horizontal Distribute Left.” Make sure “align to selection” is checked and not “align to artboard.” Otherwise you’ll spread out your points all across your artboard and you don’t want that.

To make the tip, I wanted a perfect 45 degree angle. Why? Because I feel it’s more iconic when angles are in good harmony with each other. Angles like 45, 90, 60, 30 are all good angles to use. To get the 45 degree angle, I held shift when creating my line. I lined it up with the left point and then selected and repositioned the “tip” to match. There might be a more exact way of doing this, but this way gets me close. I also drew another vertical line down the center of the sword and aligned it with the rest.

To create the handle, I did a lot of the same techniques as above. I started with a basic rectangle, created a midpoint, and moved it upwards slightly. I used a 15 degree reference line instead this time. How did I get it exactly 15 degrees? I started with a horizontal line, then used the Transform palette to rotate it exactly 15 degrees. Get used to this tool because it comes in handy!

I gave the handle guard a white fill in addition to the black stroke so I could position it on top of the blade and cover up parts I don’t want people to see. To create the rest of the handle I did more of the same. For the pommel (bottom tip of the handle) I made a rectangle and used Warp > Bulge to get it a slightly bulbous shape.

Step Two: The Book

For the book, in this case The Bible, I kept things simple by illustrating only the essential elements. The page, stuff on the page, and the dimension or thickness of the book. I started with one half first and then mirrored it.

I’ll create temporary vanishing point guidelines to make sure I get my perspective angles correct. You can fake this of course but I wanted to make sure. And one technique that’s very common is designing one half first and then mirroring it so each side is symmetrical. Then center it up perfectly with the sword using the align tool.

Step Three: The Fire

Truth be told, this took me many attempts to get right. I had to imply the sword was on fire without over illustrating it. The fire had to look like fire and not a leaf or some other decorative doodad. And it had to be symmetrical, but I didn’t want to have the same flame on both left and right sides. The challenge was to make it FEEL symmetrical without actually being exactly the same on both sides.

I started with a flame on the left side. I made sure the bottom part of the flame followed the contour of the book below it. To communicate a flame instead of a leaf, you need to have a few tendrils. You don’t need a lot, but if you have just one (like a candle flame) it doesn’t look like a flame. Unless of course a candle is underneath it. But I didn’t want any more than three tendrils or points to keep it simple.

Once I got one I liked, I mirrored it for the right side. I used my pen tool and adjusted points around until I had something different but still similar. I kept the bottom part the same which helps create the illusion of symmetry. I only adjusted the top two points. Once I was satisfied with my flanking flames, I put in the smaller whisps on top of the sword and behind. These don’t need a lot of tendrils because there are other flames around it that communicate “this is fire”. Without the more complex flames to the left and right, you can’t be sure whether it’s fire, wind, or some other decorative swoosh.

Step Four: The Banner

I purposely left room at the top for the banner. This is where the text “revivalist” is going to go. I started by using the font Modula Sans as a base. Since I want everything to have a consistent line weight I’ll need to create new lines from scratch. Before I did that, I roughly set things up how I wanted it using the Warp > Arc Lower tool and distorting the text into position. Once it’s close, I lower the opacity of my reference and start drawing lines as simply as possible. It doesn’t have to match up exactly with my reference and it’s ok to adjust later. For the A, I actually used an upside-down V.

I positioned the banner on top of the sword and made sure it was perfectly centered. I also added the back “flaps”.

Step Five: The Wheat Stalks

I knew I wanted the wheat stalks to circle the design in some way. Instead of trying to draw a curve by hand, I started with a circle as reference and added a single point at the top of my stalk and then deleted other parts of the circle until I was left with the part I needed. To create the head of the wheat stalk, I took two overlapping circles and used the Intersect tool in my pathfinder palette. That gave me a perfect shape. I rotated it 30 degrees and mirrored it so I would have a symmetrical shape to work with. I then duplicated this shape vertically by holding Alt+Shift while I dragged it down some. After that I pressed Ctrl+D five times to repeat the last action and duplicate the shape. I added one more of those shapes on top. For the sprout-like things coming out the sides, it’s just a simple path that was duplicated and mirrored on both sides. Easy.

I moved the head into position on the stem and then individually rotated the shapes along the curve slightly. Just to make it look like it was bending along with the stem. When I was satisfied with the position, I copied it, rotated it, and positioned a second wheat stalk to the left of it. And finally I grouped the two of those together and mirrored it on the other side while making sure my wheat stalks were perfectly aligned to the center of the design.

Step Six: The Dove

Since I am not a pro at drawing a dove, I wanted to make sure I was close! So I grabbed a reference image from iStockphoto. It’s more of an illustration, but I liked the position and symmetry. I thought it would be an excellent starting point for my design.

I started out with extreme basic shapes. Circles, ovals, ellipsis, whatever you want to call them. I tried to make as few lines as possible while still capturing the essence of the bird’s body. When they are properly layered, you can create the illusion of depth very easily! Make sure the head is on top of the body, the feet on top of the wheat. The body behind the wheat, etc.

For the wings, I made one on the left side before I mirrored it to the right. Here’s a good rule of thumb for creating vector illustrations: Use as few points as possible for the cleanest curves. It’s so much easier to manipulate that way. For my wings, I made sure they were behind the body but in front of the wheat. This gives the illusion that the bird is kind of leaning forward.

For the tail feathers, I used the same technique I did in creating the head of the wheat stalks. I used two overlapping circles to cut out a basic feather shape. I used the rotate tool and held down ALT while I clicked the bottom of point of my shape to set the new pivot point. When the rotate dialog box pops up, I used 30 degrees and checked the preview button to make sure. Instead of hitting “ok” I clicked “copy” to duplicate the shape instead. And then I pressed Ctrl+D to repeat this process a bunch more times until the shape copied itself in a full circle. Pretty cool technique!

I deleted the shapes at the top that I didn’t need and set the fill color to white just so they overlapped and didn’t look transparent. I also adjusted the layering of the feathers to keep it symmetrical on both sides. With the bottom feather being furthest behind, the next two features being second, and then the top feathers being in front or on top. Does that make sense? See the image below for a breakdown.

Step Seven: Fine Tuning

In reality, there was a lot more trial and error in the process of this illustration. There was a lot nudging lines around, moving and rotating, and asking “does this look right?” Use your eye and keep the shapes and lines in harmony. And my final design was inverted (white on black) to match the colors the ministry was using on its old business card and website.

But before I made the color change, I wanted to “naturalize” the illustration a bit. Make it slightly rougher and analog. Here is a simple technique for making your vector art look a bit more natural.

Roughen it up a bit.

I selected all my strokes and went to Effect > Distort and Transform > Roughen. This took some tinkering to get to look just right! I was aiming for a subtle wobble to my linework, but not too much.

Photoshop Trickery

This looks pretty good, but I want to take it a step further. I’ll copy my entire design and open Photoshop. I’ll start a new document at about 2500 x 2500 and paste my artwork as pixels. Make sure it takes up most of the document.

After you’ve got it pasted in there, merge it with the background layer. Then go to Filter > Add Noise to about 15%. Then give it a Gaussian Blur of 2%. And finally apply a Smart Sharpen to about 140% with a 34 px radius. Now adjust the levels to eliminate the grey noise in the background.

Repeat this process about 3-4 times tinkering with your settings to get the best effect.

Aside from the fact that the lines are slightly rougher than before, notice the joints between lines. The areas where lines meet up are now a bit more blended together. It doesn’t look extremely precise and perfect. More natural. Now this isn’t always appropriate for every situation. If you wanted to keep the clean look then don’t do this. But in my case I like the analog look and felt like it worked for this project.

Back to Illustrator

At this point, I will copy and paste this back into Illustrator and give it a live trace to convert it back to vector art. I’m ok with some amount of smoothing or “quality loss” here. My image is 2500×2500 so it is pretty high res. A Live Trace will work fine. But if I wanted to keep a lot of those rough details, there is the “lettering” preset under Live Trace Options which works wonders for keeping your rough details, but is terrible for CPU performance. Your resulting vector art is often loaded with thousands of points and that’s not really good here. So I just keep the default settings.

Step Eight: Finish!

That’s it. That’s all there is. I hope you learned a bit about creating iconic vector art in Illustrator. It’s really about being able to simplify the elements as much as possible, using basic shapes as starting points, and keeping things simple, balanced, and consistent. Everything in this design has one stroke weight. Even my text. That’s the beauty of this style. This won’t work for a logo, but this illustration can be just as versatile in many situations.

Here’s my final design on black and then the finished business cards.

Mock it up!

Here are the designs mocked up on some of our templates. You can buy this tri-blend template pack from Go Media’s Arsenal. These other mockups are from our site Mockup Everything.

The post Thick Line Art: Creating Iconic Vector Art appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Introduction

Hello dear Zine readers. Simon and Jon from Studio Ace of Spade here. Today, we’ll have the pleasure of walking you through the making of our entry for an old installment of The Fox Is Black’s Recovered Books contest.

Our goal with this walk-through/PSD break down is to provide some insight on the concept behind the poster, and on the various techniques that helped during the execution phase of it.

Let’s be clear: we don’t think we’ll give you any magic recipe to create a cool poster, but rather a detailed look at what our workflow for this one was, and a look at some of our favorite techniques when manipulating images and blending them with type elements and textures. We hope you’ll be tempted to actually play with the various values we used in our level editings and filters as well as the different textures in the packs we used, in order to make this piece your own.

How it came to be

The contest on The Fox Is Black

Like we said earlier, what became this poster was an entry for The Fox Is Black’s Re-covered book contest.

The Fox Is Black, formerly Kitsune Noir, was started in April of 2007 as a way of sharing interesting ideas with likeminded people.

— From TFIB’s About page

The contest is quite simple. Bobby and his team of authors choose a book, provide some background inf, cover examples, and a deadline. Here’s some of the announcement post:

Well, it’s been a few months since our last Re-Covered Books contest, so I figured it was time we get back to creating some awesome work, don’t you think? I decided that I wanted to pick a book that was newer, something that could really inspire a lot of bold ideas and not be marred with clichés. Browsing through our library at the TFIB HQ I came across a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and realized that’s exactly what I was looking for.

It’s important to remember that this was the book that inspired Blade Runner, the emphasis here is on the word inspired. That means I don’t want to see any Harrison Ford looking guys on your covers, or anything that’s borrowed from Blade Runner. Try and use your imagination and come up with some crazy, sci-fi imagery.

And here are the examples of (beautiful) vintage covers he provided:

Having read excerpts of that book a long time ago and not seen Blade Runner yet, we quickly proceeded to do so in order to understand the difference between the 2. After some research, we also discovered a comic book version of the book, edited by Boom Comics!

After all that research and armed with our best memories of sci-fi movies (from Metropolis to The Matrix), we felt like we could go ahead with conceptualizing a direction that would be ours, even if not totally unique.

Conceptualization

The title gave us the most obvious visual direction. There are androids, sheep, electricity, dreams that are mentioned. The story includes robots that are so close to look like humans that they might not be recognized by an untrained person. It’s also happening in a society devastated by a global nuclear war, and Earth is in a shape so bad that most of the people left to colonize the stars.

In short, we want robots, electronic elements (circuit boards…), sheep, and a gloomy atmosphere.

From there, we started to gather reference photos and some other visual to create something close to a mood board.

This mood board includes a WPA poster with 2 bighorns sheep, a 1890s photo of the National Galleries of Scotland of a sheep named MacGregor, one of Hannes Beer’s ADED project installment, a photo of sleeping sheep, and the Bighorn sheep print designed by Mark Weaver.

After the mood board, we embarked on a quick texture research, to find circuit board textures we could use. As usual, Caleb from Lost and Taken got us covered, with this pack of circuit board textures, published on WeGraphics.net. Bittbox also has a series of circuit board textures up, but we ended up not using them. We’ll explain why a bit later.

After some quick sketching on paper, it became clear that trying to draw a robot sheep wouldn’t work as efficiently as using a photo as the base of our poster. We did some posters including hand drawn elements before, but this one just didn’t seem to work. Instead, we decided to use the 1890 photo of MacGregor the sheep as the base element of our poster.

Once the base of the poster was determined, we also knew we wanted to have the circuit boards present in the image as well, probably overlayed on top of it. We also knew we had to have the author name and book title on it somewhere.

A lot of the things that happened during the execution of that cover/poster were happy accidents, as it often happens with an organic design process. This means one thing: EXPERIMENTATION IS KEY. It also means that what we sometimes consider as mistakes can actually be more interesting than the original direction you planned for.

With all that said, let’s dive in the execution part of this piece, shall we?

First, some useful resources

Most of these resources will be textures. It goes from paper to stone and other grunge elements. They come from all over the internets: Lost and Taken, Bittbox, DeviantArt, sxc.hu…

The very first file you’ll need to get is the picture of MacGregor the sheep. Don’t forget to grab the biggest size available.

Let’s look at our layer palette to see what we used and what you’ll need to emulate it. First, the background.

In here, we have, from top to bottom:

• A photocopy texture made by clarisaponcedeleon and available on DeviantArt
• Scan-32 is a vintage paper texture part of a pack done by Caleb of Lost and Taken called Vintage paper textures vol. 1 (published at Design Kindle)
• VV_PaperDotsSingle is a paper texture with some heavy grain, published on Flickr by Dustin of Valleys in the Vinyl
• VV_DirtyPaperPack_02 is from a series of dirty paper textures collected by Dustin of Valleys in the Vinyl
• bashocorpo_com__paper3 is a paper texture from Bashocorpo
• Metallic blue (6) and Metallic Blue (2) are both from a pack called 7 blue grungy paper textures from Lost and Taken

You’ll also see a color layer (in blue #6faab8), but more on this later.

The next set of resources will be useful for the global texturing process:

Here’s where to grab these ones:

• Tape borders and tape borders copy are constituted of pieces of tape coming from Fuzzimo’s Flickr stream and from Lost and Taken and combined on a layer.
• Splash 3 comes from a pack of textures made by Andre Meca and published on PSD Fan
• grunge_-_dust_-_deviantart_-_too_dusty… is a film texture with dust and speckles I found on DeviantArt
• texture_from_film_-_05_-_4298403252_6b4b31470a_o_d is a grainy film texture, coming from a set by m. r. nelson on Flickr
• 4439092868_c299e91a19_o – subtle grunge – LT is part of a set of subtle grunge textures made by Lost and Taken
• Old Film 02 has been found on DeviantArt
• noise2_7 is part of the second set of noise textures put out by WeGraphics. If you don’t want to buy the set, use the free sample
• circuit board – BB is one of the textures taken from BittBox’s circuit board texture pack
• c_b_2 – BB is wrongfully credited to BittBox here, and can be found in that free set of circuit board textures at WeGraphics

Phew. That’s all the resources you’ll need in terms of textures. In addition to that, you’ll need the 2 aged effect actions, created by the good folks here at Go Media (Aged Effect One and Aged Effect Two).

Note: in order to save the actions, just do a right click on the links above, and choose “Save link as…”

Let’s make this piece

Step 1: creating a new document

Let’s remember that at first it’s supposed to become a book cover. So we could just go ahead and decide on a cover format based on one of the most common book sizes. Since we weren’t sure we’d make it through the contest and just in case we’d want to turn this into a print, we decided to design our submission as an 18×24 inches poster.

So let’s create a new 18×24 inches document in Ps. As you can see, our document will be in RGB mode since some of the filters we’ll be using in the final phases are available in RGB mode only.

Other than that, since we might end up getting this to print, don’t forget to put the resolution of your document to 300 ppi. We’ve also added guides, as they help us to structure the composition. On a 18″x24″ print, we have them typically set up at 1, 2, 9, 16 and 17 inches vertically, and 1, 2, 12, 22 and 23 inches horizontally. Then, you can also add some as needed.

Note: you might want to create a similarly set up document in Ai, and leave it open in the background. We’ll use that one for creating the type elements a bit later.

Step 2: let’s place MacGregor

We could have started with the background texture buildup, but we wanted to make sure we’d place the main element of our poster without the distractions of background textures. We already knew that our type would mimic a typical book cover layout (title at the top, author at the bottom), so a somewhat off-centered placement for MacGregor was what made sense.

Drag the sheep image in your document.  Desaturate it, then, convert it to a smart object (right click on the layer).  This allows to keep “access” to the original file, even though you’re going to resize it and/or apply filters to it. Beware, this state has some limitations. Once it’s a smart object, place and resize it as you see fit.

The image the National Galleries of Scotland are making available is fairly small. We’ll need to think about sharpening and other enhancements. In terms of sharpening, one method I like to use a lot is based on the high pass filter. It’s been explained very well on this blog by Oliver Barrett, so I won’t go over it too much in detail.

You’ll need to make a copy of your correctly placed sheep layer. Then, right click on the layer and rasterize it. Once it’s rasterized, apply the high pass filter. I used the highest value possible for the filter, 250, because the base image is so small. Switch the blending mode of the high-passed layer to soft light and play with the opacity to adjust the intensity of the effect. You can see I actually have my base layer (not high passed) on hard light, to let the color and background effects play through, then the high passed layers are set on soft light at 25% opacity. The second copy is here because I needed to make the sheep a bit more present once the background was done.

The background textures

Since we wanted to create a dark and digital mood but not fall into a Matrix style, we opted for an electric, kind of muted, blue as our base color: #6faab8. After that, we wanted to start with a paper grain and rusted metal background. As you’ll see, it evolved into something a bit different.

First, a layer filled with the base blue (#6faab8).

Then, our first texture: Metallic Blue (2). Open it, drag it in your document and place it at the center. Resize it in order to cover the full extent of the canvas (or even to go beyond its limits). Then you want to desaturate it (CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+U) and adjust its levels (CTRL/CMD+L), to bring the details of the texture out. Then, sharpen it a couple time by using the sharpen filter found at filters > sharpen > sharpen. Just compare your original Metallic Blue (2) file with the one I have here. You’ll also notice that I placed the blending mode of this texture on Overlay @ 100% opacity.

Now, by following a similar process, let’s build up all the other layers used for our background. Here, Metallic Blue (6) has been placed on Soft light @ 100% opacity, after being leveled and sharpened.

bashocorpo_com__paper3 is bringing us the splatters we wanted. It also lightens the piece.

VV_DirtyPaperPack_02 adds folds and other worn effects.

VV_PaperDotsSingle is probably the texture that has the most impact throughout the piece. It’s what makes the final piece’s halftone effect so strong. Now that we have a chance to look back on this, maybe we would have put it on Soft light instead of Overlay, and also down to 50% opacity instead of 75%. Yet, as said before, it’s what brings most of the main feel to the piece. It’s bringing these great lines of worn folds.

Scan-32 is part of the Vintage paper textures Vol. 1. We edited the levels to make it really dark (the black is at 125, the mid-tones at 0.5 and the white at 200). Using Linear burn as a blending mode brings a lot of dark back into the piece.

Finally, ending up with the photocopy texture on Soft light @ 75% opacity helps to restore some light in the center zone, where MacGregor awaits some further treatment.

This concludes the background. If you’ve read our tutorial/case study of our Lost and Taken poster on this very blog, you’ll see that the process to play with the textures and combine them together is pretty similar.

Adjustments to MacGregor

Once you turn back on the layers for MacGregor, this is what your piece should resemble. All the texture work of the background is hidden! So, instead of leaving your base sheep layer on normal @ 100% opacity, let’s switch it to hard light.

The result of this blending mode switch lets the background show through pretty well. We’re definitely hitting the grunge vibe we wanted the piece to have.

We’re not having much of a technological feel to this, but that’s where the global texturing process will play. For now, it’s time to create our type elements.

The type elements creation

As a rule of thumb, when working on a piece like this one where there aren’t too many type elements to manage, we like to create them in Ai. It offers more control on the type, and allows to adjust scaling at will before applying textures and other effects.

Here are the final elements we used in the piece.

You’ve probably all recognized Gotham. We decided to use it because it’s a really legible typeface, but also because it has that great vintage feel. Because of the overall dark piece, we wanted the type to be white. In order to make sure it would be legible, we included it within these black blocks that act as a separation between the busy texture of the piece and the type. Finally, the white rectangles help to structure the type elements a bit better.

If you look closely at our type elements, you’ll notice they’re looking worn out. To achieve this effect, we’re using the roughen filter in Ai (Effect > Distort and Transform > Roughen). You can see the values we’ve used on the screenshot. We need to give credit here to Simon Walker (aka Super Furry) and to Dan Cassaro (aka Youngjerks) for the tips and tricks on how to use this filter. Simon did a great post over at Method & Craft detailing his use of it.

When placing our type back in the piece in Ps, we realized that white type in a black rectangle wasn’t that efficient. We then decided to invert the type elements to black text in white rectangles, which has much more visual impact.

Once both type elements were placed, it was time to start adding texture to them.  Instead of adding another set of texture layers specifically to them, we decided to just place their blending mode on Soft light @ 100% opacity. When stacking copies of the layer, you’ll give it more opacity, with the textures below still playing through it. In our case, we stacked up 3 copies of the layer of each type block.

You’ll also notice a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer for both elements, and here’s the reason why. This is what happens without the adjustment layer:

The colors are just way too “hot”, too saturated by places. Sometimes, this can be a sought after effect. James White (aka Signalnoise) explained in his broadcast about his Dagger Woods poster that his really flashy colors are often obtained that way. But this time, we weren’t pursuing this route, so we added that adjustment layer, and turned the saturation down to -75.

Which gives us the following result:

Much more subtle. Also, remember we’re designing in RGB, and that when printing, these really bright colors don’t translate all that well (unless you add a spot color and work with some really talented pre-press guys).

The last thing we added to the type was a layer mask in which we pasted a grunge texture to add some extra grunge. Demonstration:

Without the grunged layer mask, this is what we get.

Here’s what the content of my layer mask looks like:

The texture was probably taken from this grungy lamp post texture pack from DesignInstruct, but we could be wrong. To paste a texture in a layer mask, it’s quite easy. Start by opening the texture you’re interested to use. Copy all its content (CTRL/CMD+A, CTRL/CMD+ C). Then go to your main document, and ALT+CLICK on the layer mask. You’ll be switched to see the content of the layer mask. You then just have to paste the texture you previously copied in there, adjust its placement, size and levels, maybe use the sharpen filter, and you’re all set. This technique allows to use elements than are bigger than brushed, which are limited to a 2500×2500 pixels size. And here’s the result of our manipulation:

Here’s a shot of the current state of our piece:

Now that the type is in place, it’s time to add some global textures on here.

Global texturing

This step is important, because it helps us to bring coherence to the piece by unifying all the elements together. The technique behind it is the same than when building the textures for the background, except this time you have to take the legibility of everything you have underneath into account. What’s the point of adding more to the composition if it takes your original work away?

Let’s start by adding something we’ve been talking about from the start, the circuit board textures.

We’ll start by using c_2_b, which comes from that WeGraphics free texture pack. We placed it vertically and made sure it would cover all the design. After the typical desaturation, sharpening and level editing, we switched its blending mode to Overlay @ 100% opacity.

Thinking the effect wasn’t as strong as we wanted it to be, we duplicated the texture, which gave us the following result:

We were happy with the added intensity. We just put the opacity of the copy a bit down to 75%.

If you looked well, you’ll see we have a layer mask on part of the board textures. The reason for that layer mask is to soften the board texture on the text blocks. Let’s look closer at our text without the layer mask:

And now, here’s the text with the layer mask being active:

It’s really subtle on the top part, more obvious on the credits, and helps quite a bit. The layer mask content consists of the text blocks surface filled with #d4d4d4 gray.

Next texture in line is one of the circuit board textures from Bittbox’s set. It’s on Soft light @ 100% opacity. It adds some really soft lines.

Next, we have noise2_7 (or you can use the free sample, spot the link under the download button). It’s placed on Screen @ 50% opacity. Screen makes the black parts of the image transparent, which just leaves the white speckles and dust appearing. This ages your piece in a heart beat.

For the same reason we duplicated the circuit board texture, we’ve duplicated that one too. The other thing we did to the duplicated layer is to rotate it 180°, to add some more visual variations.

Next texture in line, Old_Film_02. Placed on Soft light @ 50% opacity, it’ll had some soft hints of more dust and speckles.

The next texture is taken from Lost and Taken’s subtle grunge textures. Placed on Soft light @ 100% opacity, it brings some brightness back in the piece.

m. r. nelson’s texture_from_film_05 brings some of that film grain into the piece. Soft light @ 100% opacity.

too_dusty, the film texture from Miss Alienation’s DeviantArt gallery, is yet another dust speckle texture. You’ll need to apply some pretty harsh levels to make the speckles come out. Place it on Soft light @ 50% opacity.

Andre Meca’s splash texture adds another layer of subtle variations. Its blending mode should be Soft light at 50% opacity.

The tape border layer has been created using the various pieces of tape of the packs I listed above. If it’s too long and painful for you, you could also use these great brushes released by Chris Spooner. Combine your tape elements to create a frame that would go around the edge of the piece. Then, put the layer on overlay @ 100% opacity. Since we didn’t think it was creating a strong enough frame, we duplicated it and tuned down the opacity of the copy to 75%.

Phew. Almost done! Bear with me for the finishing touches, and you’ll have yourself a great finished product!

Finalizing the piece

So far, here’s what we have:

What we’ll do now is to gain time in the following steps. First, select the whole piece (CTRL/CMD+A) and then crop it (Image > crop). The reason we do that is to clear the file of the excess of texture that goes beyond the limits of the canvas. You don’t see them, but Ps does and it slows it down when applying filters and inflates your file size.

Once the cropping is done, let’s create a new layer that will include a merged copy of all the content of our piece so far. There’s a shortcut for this, it’s SHIFT+CTRL/CMD+ALT/OPTION+E. Once that’s done (and it can take a while, so go grab a warmer for your coffee mug), make 2 copies of that layer.

This is where the actions we’ve asked you to download will get useful. Get them loaded in Ps, and let’s play with them a little (Addicted to design wrote a quick how-to).

Run the first aging action on on the first copy of the comp layer. Here’s a preview of the result:

The action effect is a really harsh, almost xerox like (but with color) rendition of the piece. Let’s switch that to Soft light @ 25% opacity, for a less aggressive result.

Let’s turn back on the second copy of our comp and run the 2nd aging action on it:

For the same reasons as before, let’s switch this to Soft Light @ 25% opacity, and it’ll already look much better.

These 2 actions help to enhance the contrast, while still adding something of an aged look to the piece. Now the last piece, the halftone effect.

The halftone effect we use to finish most of the posters we do is greatly based on this tutorial written by Adam Levermore. Mad props to him. Let’s create another comp layer (once again, the shortcut for that is SHIFT+CTRL/CMD+ALT/OPTION+E). Once it’s done, rename it halftones and make it a smart object. Reset your color palette to black as your foreground color and white as the background color. We do this because your active foreground color will be used as the color of the dots of the halftone effect. Go to Filter > Sketch > Halftone pattern. Here’s what you should see:

The first thing you should go is head over to the zoom menu, and hit the “Fit in view” option. Now you’ll see what you’re doing. After that, we choose to emulate a pretty realistic halftone effect, with a minimum dot size of 5. We set the contrast at 15, like that it’s high enough to still show highlights and dark areas, but it’s also low enough for the brightest areas to how some of the halftone dots in them. Here’s the result:

Now, it’s time to use to our benefit some of the smart object status of our halftone layer. First, let’s change the blending mode of the actual halftone effect. Double click on that symbol, noted 1.. Then, in the drop-down menu (2.), choose Soft light @ 100%.

And then, finally, we can put the blending mode of the layer on lighten @ 50%.

Now, hit File > save! Save it as a PSB, as the final file is over the PSD file format size limit. Our file weighs a whopping 2.5+ Gb. And here you are, with a neat grunge, Do androids dream of electric sheep?-themed, poster.

Conclusion

Thanks again for sticking with us to the end of this rather long tutorial. We hope we’ve given you some insight on how we do things. If you have questions, suggestions, love/hate messages, let’s get the discussion going in the comments! Also, if you want to follow the progress of the poster as we made it, you can check the stream of Dribbble rebounds associated with it.

Simon H. and Jon Savage, Studio Ace of Spade.

The post Do androids dream of electric sheep PSD breakdown appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Before we get started

Hey everyone,

Chris Parks (AKA Pale Horse) here for Go Media. Today, I’ll be outlining my recent experience working with The Indomina Group, a global entertainment company who produce and distribute movies, television, music and interactive games. Their latest project was a Hong Kong, wire-fu, murder mystery release called “Detective Dee & the Mystery of the Phantom Flame”. Indomina contacted me to create a limited edition poster design to promote the release of the film here in the U.S.

I absolutely love screen-printed, movie posters, as they give artists the chance to create a piece that is far more interesting and collectable than the standard, glossy, big budget designs released to the masses.

Below is a shot of the final, approved artwork that was printed for the release.

Client correspondence

To give you full insight into the project from start to finish, I’ve included the interaction emails with the client and progress shots along the way so you can follow along.

Lauren Fisher – Client

We’ve started a project at Indomina where we release an art/teaser poster for every theatrical release we do.

We just finished one for Griff The Invisible that will premiere this week at Comic Con and I need to get started on the next one, which is for Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. It’s an AMAZING film, full of kung-fu awesomeness, high-production values and a stellar cast.

I love your work so much and I think you could come up with something awesome based on the imagery from Dee. 

I’m thinking since it’s teaser art we don’t have to cram a bunch of type on there…the title is a mouthful on its own: “Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame”

I’m attaching the official key art here and I’ll send you a link to the trailer after it premieres, which should be in a couple of days! I was hoping to have it finished a month from now to release before the film comes out. What do you think?

I thought it was really cool that even though I didn’t have any previous movie poster pieces in my portfolio, the client saw the potential in my illustrations for this type of work. I didn’t hesitate to jump all over this one!

Along with working out the budget, I responded with some initial questions to get things rolling. When working out project budgets, there are usually several factors I take into consideration. Some of the factors I considered here were: the number of hours I plan to spend on the piece, where the artwork will be used, timeline for completion, getting public credit for the work / adding my logo to the piece, how much I would enjoy working on it and so on. Since my work is pretty detailed and there are 5 characters, dragons, typography and background imagery, I estimated about 26-30 hours of illustration time on this one. I always attempt to at least get paid for the actual hours put into the piece. There is of course, also, time involved for back and forth emails, phone calls, changes, etc. that are hard to estimate. With smaller projects, like limited edition posters, a lot of these extras often get thrown in for free, as the price could potentially become too expensive to make sense for this type of project. To cover your ass, you definitely want to establish early-on in your estimate, what you are providing (eg. concept sketches, number of revisions, final file formats ex.) so that if things get hairy with a needy client, you don’t go broke trying to finish the project.

Note: As a rule, I also take a 50% down payment (wherever possible) to make the project official and add it to my schedule.

Chris Parks – Artist

Count me in!  The budget sounds good and will allow me the necessary time to put some of love into the piece and make sure it’s really badass! The month timeline should work fine as well. See below for some initial questions and I’ll send over my official pricing .PDF and 1/2 down payment info to lock you into the schedule to get rockin’ as soon as possible.

• Will the poster be screen-printed or full color? 
• If screen-printed, should I stick to a certain # of ink colors
• Can I create custom typography for the title or should we just use the current logotype?
• Will it be a standard 18×24 in. size?
• Do you have a folder of images / characters that I can use for reference? (I found a few on dee.indomina.com, just wondered if there are others to utilize)
• Is it possible to watch the movie before getting started?

The post Screen-Printed Movie Poster Tutorial by Pale Horse appeared first on GoMediaZine.

FOUNDFONT™ tutorial

Andy Hayes here from Hucklebuck Design Studio. The subject for this tutorial will revolve around a pet project of mine called FOUNDFONT™. Foundfont™ is dedicated to typographic archaeology as well as the use of found typography within design. It’s about extracting unique type for specific design needs or creating complete type sets based on found examples. FOUNDFONT™ offers typefaces but also hopes to inspire designers to do their own digging.

In this tutorial we’ll talk about what makes a good FOUNDFONT™ source and the steps to creating your own usable vector characters from found samples.

Type is where you find it

Useful typography is not only found within the bounds of one of today’s successful foundries. It’s all around us. In the bad signs you may see while walking down the street, on old packaging you might have picked up from a thrift store, even in random images you might stumble upon while trolling google image. These artifacts are often one-off, hand lettered little pieces of magic just waiting to be pulled into the 21st century. In many things that I create, whether it be a tee graphic or a poster design, I often look for opportunities to use these found examples in my layout instead of going back to my favorite type families. I find it can often yield interesting and ultimately unique results.

Here are a few great samples that are ripe for repurposing.

What makes a good FOUNDFONT™ source?

There are a few questions to ask when scouting good FOUNDFONT™ resources that will help you get the best result. Here they are:

1. Are you starting with a quality image?
   The source image that you start with should be high res if pulled from online, or in good condition if found more traditionally. If the detail in the characters you have to start with is poor, it’s hard to overcome. It will leave you guessing at details.
2. Is the type sample in a photo skewed?
   If it is a photograph be sure that it is shot without a skewed perspective. If you start with something that is distorted you’ll find yourself putting a lot of work in to fix it.
3. Am I just recreating a font that exists and is possibly copywritten?
   When I do the FOUNDFONT™ thing I am always looking for type that was either hand done or old and out of distribution. Why recreate a font if you can just buy it online? Keep an eye out for interesting and unique sources to make sure you’re not just duping.
4. Does the sample I found contain the key character DNA that you need?
   When retroactively building type from a found sample there is a set of characters that you should try to aim for. These characters will contain the DNA for all 26 letters in the alphabet enabling you to create letters that you don’t have.

The set of key characters for capitals is: A, B, D, E, J, M, O, S.

A: From A you can create V, W, Y
B: From B you can create a P, R
E: From E you can create F, H, I, L, T, X,Z
J: From J you can create U
M: From M you can create N
O: From O you can create C, G, Q

D and S are unique. Especially the S. If you have nothing to go on for the letter S you’re playing that familiar guessing game we’ve mentioned a few times already. D could be created using the O, but it does often have slight quirks.

The set of key characters for lowercase is: a, b, f, g, k, m, o, s, v

b: From b you can get d, h, l, p, q
f: From f you can get t,
m: From m you can get n, u
o: From o you can get c, e
v: From v you can get w

g, k and s are unique. s, again, will be the toughest recreation if you have little to go by. Look at the curves of your c and a for cues. Letters like x and z should be fairly easy to recreate with little information. Remember to pay attention to stroke weight and other foundational elements of your character’s structure.

Cleaning up and extracting your type

Once you have a good source it’s time to start cleaning it up and start the process that will eventually lead to a set of vector characters for use in layout. I’ve pulled a good source and and will go through the process step by step in a series of screencasts.

Step 1. Identifying your type source

To reiterate, be sure your found sample is of decent resolution, not skewed, fairly original, and contains the key letters for your character DNA. My sample is from a motorcycle jacket that I ran across online. I’d guess the typography was hand embroidered or chenille embroidery. Not a proper font but a great piece of typography worth extracting.

2. Killing the color

Open your image in Photoshop and take its image mode to grayscale as the first step in amplifying its contrast.

3. Amplifying contrast

Once you’ve gone grayscale, you’ll need to increase the contrast of your image. Levels are an easy way to build this contrast. The goal is to eliminate all gray leaving you with only black and white in your image.

4. Delete anything that isn’t the type you’re after

Now that your contrast is amplified select the rest of the image and delete it. It may prove easier to select your type and invert the selection. All we need is the type.

5. Adding pixels to smooth out the edges

After eliminating everything else but your type you might notice that the edges are a bit rough. The easiest cure for this is you just bump the resolution up to add pixels. This will take a bit of the roughness away.

6. Finalizing your smoothed type

Now that your resolution has been increased you can completely smooth the edges by simply using the gaussian blur filter and your levels to harden the edges. When you are done with that, save the type as a grayscale tiff and close the file.

7. Going vector

Create a new document in Adobe Illustrator and place your final tiff into the new document. Go into your tracing options (object/live trace/tracing options), turn on the ignore white option and turn on the preview. This should give you a good idea of how good your trace will be. Apply the trace and click expand to make the trace editable.

8. Editing your type

After you click to expand the live trace you’ll need to ungroup the type and begin the process of lining the type up on a baseline, tweaking the trace results and creating the letters you need out of the letters you have.

Once you identify the characters that you need to modify to create the characters you are missing, use your knife tool to cut letters apart. The knife tool allows you to cut through the vector shape without losing any of it like you would with the eraser tool. Once you break up the core strokes of the characters you can easily begin to rearrange and create your missing characters. For example a trimmed down, and rearranged letter “A” easily becomes a “V” and a “W” as seen in the short video accompanying this section.

You’ll find that as you cut your letters apart and so on that there will inevitably be a few edges that need smoothing or refinement. Instead of somehow using the pen tool to pull the points of your type, use the pencil tool. The pencil tool allows you to modify the contours of your character in a more natural way. If you have a wacom tablet or any other brand that allows you to draw with a stylus you will find this technique very natural. Zoom in as much as you can to see the details of your characters as you modify them.

Final Result

Whether you’re trying to create an entire alphabet or just the letters you need for a logo your final result could look something like this.

The big takeaway is that you should explore typography that is outside of where you might typically look. Creating unique typographic solutions using found typography will always be interesting and one of a kind. Good luck on your hunt.

Enjoy this free download of MC GOTHIC and go to http://foundfont.tumblr.com/ to purchase more FOUNDFONT™ sets. We’re adding new type all the time!

Note from the editor: if you have some issues with the videos, you can find them all on Andy’s Screenr profile.

The post FOUNDFONT™ and the Art of Typographic Archaeology appeared first on GoMediaZine.

Hey Go Media faithful! As Go Media has evolved over the years, we’ve learned that collaboration with other artists and designers can be a very powerful tool when trying to deliver the very best product to your client. Different designers have different skill sets. When Go Media assembles a team to work on a project some of those people may be in our firm and others may not. I recently had an amazing experience collaborating with a good friend of mine; Steve Knerem on an illustration for Cage Spawn Clothing. This article will be kind of a hybrid – half tutorial and half discussion on the idea of collaborating.

Getting Started

The design brief for this t-shirt design was fairly simple: “Make a sick looking Samurai t-shirt.” I’ve been working with Preston Bennet of Cage Spawn for a while, so he has total faith in my abilities. It’s nice to work with clients that throw you a simple concept and some ideas, and then just let you go to town. As with any illustration, I started by drawing some horrifically rough poses.

Preston selected pose #2. He liked the way the arms crossed, and thought we could frame up the CageSpawn type treatment between the tips of the swords. Here is the type treatment Jeff Finley did for Cage Spawn. It was actually a design “refresh.” We wanted to fix up their existing type treatment, which we thought could be improved upon. The existing one was just too straight and rigid. We needed to infuse it with some flow. I think Jeff did an amazing job.

Original Type Treatment

Go Media’s type treatment refresh.

Once I knew the pose that Preston wanted, I sat right down and tried to translate my uber rough sketch into a tight pencil drawing. I had plenty of Samurai images tacked up around my drawing table, was excited about the pose, and put in several hours trying to make the pose work. Unfortunately, sometimes the really rough sketches include some physical impossibilities. The exact positioning of the arms in this case were simply not working. In lieu of driving myself crazy, I decided to grab my camera and do a quick model shot. These photos don’t need to be anything fancy. I was just trying to get the pose clear in my head. I had a few tubes to use as the swords and here are the images I shot:

From those photos I was able to work out the following pose sketches:

I posted those for Preston to make a decision about which hand-position looked best to him. We agreed that it was #1.

In many regards, this is the most difficult part of the illustration process. Once I have the pose in place with the right perspective drawing all the armor and the mask/helmet goes fairly quickly. I made decisions about what the armor and helmet looked like through looking at reference photos of actual Samurai armor, and then making some of it up as I went along. Here is the illustration at about 80% complete.

Once I had the illustration this far along I planned on filling in the remaining 20% of the art while I was inking. But before I started the inking I went on vacation. And while I was on vacation I badly injured my neck and upper back. I was in so much pain that I didn’t sleep for three straight days. When I got back to the office, I knew there was no way I could spend 8+ hours hunched over a drawing board inking this piece. But Go Media had a deadline (in this case we were already way past our deadline.) I knew my injury wouldn’t go away anytime soon.

The Collaboration Starts.

Although, in this case the collaboration was born of necessity, Steve and I had been talking about collaborating on an illustration for months before this. I knew he was the guy to take over and get the drawing finished. Check out Steve’s work here: steveknerem.com Once the ink was done, I could get it into the computer and take over the coloring and design. I already had great respect for Steve’s work, so I really didn’t give him too much direction. I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do with the bottom of the Samurai, the armor was incomplete and the flames were incomplete. I pointed all that out but basically said: “make it look sweet.” As I handed him my art I really felt like I was just giving him an inking job. But Steve decided to finish the pencils and get my thumbs up before he started inking.

When Steve brought me the finished pencil drawing I almost fell over. I was completely blown away. He didn’t just finish what I had started, he added a LOT. I wasn’t expecting the masterpiece he showed me. This is a GREAT rule in business and in life. Give people more than they expect. “Under promise, and over deliver” we say at Go Media. It turns normal customers into fans and advocates.

Here is the final pencil illustration that Steve showed me:

Meanwhile, Preston had a friend that was studying Chinese/Japanese calligraphy. He thought some original calligraphy would make a sweet addition to the design. I agreed. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure how I was going to put together the growing list of design elements: Samurai Illustration, Japanese Sun, Cagespawn logotype and now calligraphy! But it was very exciting to have all these great elements to work with. Normally, I like to work out the entire design layout in advance before I start drawing, but what can I say – this project just evolved this way, and I was happy to go with the flow.

Steve Takes Over

I couldn’t have been happier to get the bullpen call from Bill. Unfortunately it was at the expense of Bill’s injury, but nonetheless our talks about a collaboration project gave birth. My part of the journey began when I was visiting some friends out of town. I read the email from Bill on my phone and I interrupted my wife who was talking with friends saying “Awesome, listen to this!” In my mind I had to fly home right away, meet with Bill and begin my part of the collab. Well once I calmed down I responded back of course accepting the job.

Here is a lesson learned when responding to an email: make sure they receive your email! After I sent my eager response, I heard nothing from Bill…uh oh. My mind was racing thinking he called in some other help, so I called a few people at the Go Media office on a Thursday afternoon, emailed Bill again and got him on the phone where I accepted the job and we set a time to meet. Whew!

I landed at 5:20pm in Cleveland on a Monday and got to Go Media an hour later. So my point with all this is don’t give up, fight for what you want. Show your clients you are eager and willing to do what has to be done. That day the hand of Crom was upon me!

So I meet Bill and we discuss the project. He showed me what Go Media already had done for Cagespawn which was out of control awesome. I felt honored to be a part of this circle of excellence. I felt at that point Bill really trusted me to finish the job. It was a very professional experience knowing I was trusted, respected and someone digs my work. So the lesson to learn is: be a professional, you never know when you will get a call. Make awesome work because you never know who is looking. Own your game because someone is always looking for originality.

The Pencil Stage

Finally I sat down and I looked over the project and thought of all the illustration I saw Bill do for the past 5 years. I’ve always loved Bill’s style and characters so the tricky part is to retain all of what he did and add my fireworks to it…no pressure. I can say I really felt confident. In the past year and a half this confidence grew on me because I owned my game. In return if I was in the same situation and had to hand a project to Bill, I know that he would reciprocate the same excellence and pride. Lesson to learn, build relationships. That’s what business and friendships are all about.

I did my research on samurai characters, garments, weapons and what the essence of a samurai warrior is. Right away I shifted into “insane detail mode” which is usually my only gear. I looked at Bill’s character as a strong foundation to build upon. I added blood, banners, costume design, smoke, flames, hair and a solid light source and that solidified my part of the pencil drawing.

Remember add your own twist to something in the pencil stage. The worst that could happen is the client won’t like a part. So what. Erase it and set it back to the original state. Lesson to learn: take initiative to present something above and beyond because it might just come to pass!

A quick example is the blood dripping from the mouth and the hand of the samurai and also the hair.

So I take this drawing to Bill. I’m a little nervous but confident. Bill was thrilled and it made me happy knowing I over delivered. Lesson learned: GO OVERBOARD!! I do recall a high five exchange between us.

The Inking Stage

The ink stage is very different. You can have a shaky hand with the pencil but this is where breathing, patience, discipline, skill, and decision making come into play. When I start a drawing I like to attack my fears head on, with the face. I keep it simple at first and outline the jaw line, eyes and nose.

I use Micron pens because they don’t bleed and they have good flow. They do dry up so keep a fresh stock. I noticed there is a lot of symmetry with the helmet so paying attention to proportions is vital. The swords, arm guards and back body armor need to look the same too. These are at different angles so there is a little leeway with symmetry but they still have to be consistent.

The good thing is you lay this out in the pencil stage. Just remember INKING IS NOT TRACING. You still have to think this through. Some parts will need a thick line and a thin line. This is what makes a dynamic piece.

Probably my biggest concern was retaining Bill’s precise hatch marks and style. Bill is very sharp and clean with his edges especially when he inks. With a collab you want it to look as consistent as possible but you can see each artist’s hand. It is a challenge and a lot of fun. I simply had to rest in my own abilities and keep telling myself to breathe, be confident in my own game and have fun. Lesson to learn: Never think that you are so good that you don’t need to stay disciplined. Personally every project I work on has its own challenges and I am always working to prove myself better than before. (It keeps your internal edge sharp!)

I wrapped up my part on time, on budget and Bill took over the color and design stages. Overall it was a great experience to work with Bill. Make those connections with other artists, build your pool of networks and always stay connected. Sometimes the element of surprise is the most rewarding.

Here is the final inked artwork I handed over to Bill:

Bill Takes over on color and design.

When I was a kid I loved to color. It was a fun, carefree activity. I can remember when the only real challenge was “staying inside the lines.” As an adult, it’s a very different story. I don’t think I am a particularly good colorist. I haven’t really spent enough time doing it. Also, I’ve been exposed to the best of the best comic book colorists – for years. On top of the belief that I’m just not a very good colorist, I have the added pressure of living up to the standards Steve set by doing such a phenomenal job finishing my illustration. So, when I considered my task at hand, I’ll admit, I did so with dread.

For better or worse, collaboration will push you to “up your game.” You have a respected peer that will be closely examining, working with and depending on what you produce. The pressure is on. Unfortunately, I’ve procrastinated as long as I can. I have to get started.

I color so infrequently that I don’t even have a good process down. I have some sense of what I need to do, but nothing concrete. For about three days leading up to getting started I kept debating about how to do it. I could put the art in Illustrator and create vector shapes for each color. I’ve done this before and been very happy with the results. But this can be a very labor intensive process. To create the illusion of a gradient I may need to draw 3-7 shapes for each gradient. Although it’s a tedious process, it’s this particular segmented look of those faux gradients that I really like. It’s almost like the coloring is part of the illustration; each color segment forms contour lines that help define the shape of the object. It’s awesome. Here is an example of a piece I did using that coloring technique:

But I chose not to do that. Instead I decided to go into Photoshop and “paint” the coloring into the drawing. I chose this route primarily because this samurai was covered in fire. Vector coloring would have forced me to define the fire in hard shapes. I just couldn’t imagine how I was even going to pull that off. It would have taken me a year. Also, Go Media happens to own a Wacom Cintiq. If you’re unfamiliar with the Cintiq – imagine a large monitor that tilts and spins and allows you to draw directly on the screen with a pressure sensitive pen. That’s right, it’s a high priced designer’s toy… er… I mean, critical piece of equipment.

A Tip to Getting Started on Something You’re Afraid of:

So, I knew I was going to “paint” the coloring in Photoshop, I knew I was going to use the Cintiq and I had the final art provided by Steve, but I was still in dread. I didn’t really know how I was going to combine all the design elements (Japanese calligraphy, Japanese sun, the illustration, CageSpawn logotype and CageSpawn mark – the cthulu). I didn’t know what colors to use. I didn’t know how to restrict the color palette so that the printer could manufacture this shirt using a max of 4 ink colors. I didn’t know how to prep my coloring so it could be easily separated. My mind was a whirlwind of questions and fears. When you’re focusing on all the what-ifs and concerns it can really be crippling. When I find myself in this situation of NEEDING to start, but being afraid of starting I employ a little technique. I focus on getting ready to start working instead of focusing on what I’m going to do once I do “get started.” For instance, I don’t know how I’m going to color this art, but I do know I’ll need to scan the final inked art into the computer. Great! I’ve done it. I’ve started! I know I’ll need to set up a layered Photoshop document where my art is on the top layer, I need to set that layer to multiply and lock it. I know it would be helpful if I created a mask of the samurai so I can fill him in easily without going “outside the lines.” Also, I’ll need to make my Japanese sun – which I choose to do in Illustrator so I have maximum flexibility later. Essentially, I get started on all the non-critical steps of the project. And what I’ve found is that most of any project is just non-critical steps. Even the coloring itself, when broken down into small pieces, are each really not so critical.

So, here are each of the not-so critical steps I took to color this artwork, and a sample image of each:

I made a Japanese sun in Illustrator using a flag image that I found on the internet. But I needed my rays to extend beyond the flag, so I just extended each line further out.

Once I finished the sun I dropped it along with the CageSpawn logotype into Photoshop to workout the layout. I thought the sun would look good positioned over the shoulder of my Samurai.

I wanted my sun’s rays to fade out, but in a kind of grungy way. So, I stared by air-brushing black around the tips of the rays just to make sure they wouldn’t end sharply. Then I used some of Go Media’s Destroy Vector Packs to grunge up the tips of the rays. Finally, I dropped in a black background. This reveals how the sun will look… pretty cool.

Now that I have the sun in place, I continue just working away on “non-critical” steps… like filling in my samurai. I’ll be able to use this shape as a base layer of art and also a mask.

I knew that the flames would require a painterly style with lots of gradients. So, I switch over to my airbrush, dial back the Flow to about 15% and start “painting.”

I thought now might be a good time to give you a look at how I have my Photoshop file layers set up. It continues to get more complex than this, but this should help you understand how I work. When I was young I tried to work in as few layers as possible, and generally didn’t appreciate the power they provide. So, if you’re new to working with Photoshop and Illustrator and you’re not paying close attention to the layers – (like locking, linking and setting visibility) START NOW!

For my flames I kind of stumbled upon this pointillism gradient that looked really good and matched nicely with the style Steve inked the piece.

Because I was working with a lot of flames and glowing, I thought this shirt would look amazing on a deep red shirt, so I swapped out my background color and sure enough – it looked great.

Since the flames were lapping up around the logotype, I decided to also make it flame-like. And that worked perfectly with the shapes of the lettering. It really came together beautifully in the end. Here is the final colored artwork.

Now of course, I’m a HUGE advocate of presenting your designs to your client in the very best way. So, I just had to mock up this design onto a t-shirt. I used one of our t-shirt templates, but you could also use ShirtMockup.com.

Almost done. I still had the calligraphy, and I wanted to use the CageSpawn mark that I had designed on a previous project. Sounds like I need to design a back to this t-shirt!

One last plug… to add the splattered yellow effects around the lettering, I used our Vector Set 17 which has a ton of grungy elements.

At some point while I was “getting started” my fears and concerns faded away and were replaced with fun. I’ll admit, I even forgot about how the printer was going to color separate this. Looking back now, I don’t even know why I was worried about that. That’s not my job. That’s the printer (color separator’s job! That’s why they get paid.)

One lesson I’ve learned in life, business and art is – you can’t let the unknown slow you down. Go Media is an incubator of sorts to several companies that work out of our building. We’re periodically (more frequently than I would prefer) asking ourselves questions like: “Will this get us arrested?” or “Will the fire marshal shut us down?” We don’t always know, but we press on. You can’t let your fears stop your progress. Even if you do something, and your fears come to fruition and all your hard work is for not – I still think the process of doing, learning and experiencing are better than sitting on your butt doing nothing. Fortunately, we have not been arrested for anything – yet.

AND! Last, but not least – if you would like to pre-order this shirt from CageSpawn, go here: CageSpawn Ronin T-shirt Pre-order.

The post Collaboration! Two samurai (artists) are more powerful than one. appeared first on GoMediaZine.