Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The orb with special effects

These days I learned some new stuff. I will show today something I liked doing, I call it “the orb with special effects” :)

Start by making a black background. Then make a new layer. Pick a color to start with. I like blue so i chose a dark blue to start with.

We’ll go all way to a brightest color(in my case the brightest blue), so pick for start a dark color.
I have “only web colors” on because i have less color to work with for this project, so it's a little bit easier this way.

Now select a soft brush (turn the hardness to 0) and just click once.


Change color to a brighter one and again clik once, this time over the one you just painted.





Make the brush a little smaller, change the color to a brighter one and do the same thing again. Repeat the step above twice, without changing the size of the brush. Make this step one more time, choose white as foreground color and a smaller brush. Now you have the orb. A easier way to adjust the size of the brush is by using [ ] keys.









Create a tail using the smudge tool. You’ll find the smudge tool here :


Select it, adjust the master diameter,set the strength to about 85-86%

Put the mouse pointer to the end of the orb and drag. And if you click on the tail again you will make it just a little big longer… and longer :)






First time you do this you might have to do it a few times until you get what you want . You always can come back and undo the mistake(ctrl+z and if you want to undo more ctrl+alt+z). Make a smaller brush and make forms, start from the middle of the orb to highlight the tail. Make little wings coming off.



And now i'll make bubbles

Make a separate layer, above the orb layer.

Now, select the bubbles brush from the brush tool. Pick a color and start paint over the shape you created earlier. You can lower the opacity of the bubbles layer if you consider it’s look better.




That’s it ! Have fun !

Monday, September 15, 2008

Make bubbles

Hello !

A few months ago I tried to do this :


“Easy” I said when I started. ”I have the bottle and the girl. All I have to do is the bubbles.” I did the bobbles using a brush with different dimension. It took me a lot of time and in the end it didn’t look like the original.
I tried to find on internet how I could to it but I didn’t now what I was looking for. So I quit.


Doing a tutorial i found a way to do it.

Select paint brush. Create a brush that will allow you to make that little scattered bubbles. In order to do that you must select the brush pallet from Window - Brushes.


Select Scattering. You will see that the brush is composed now from little tiny brushes. You can control the scatter by adjusting the scatter control.


You also can adjust the jitter size by selecting Shape Dynamics. From here, if you select from Control : Fade, you will have larger bubbles at the start and the particle will get smaller as you’ll paint.






You also can control the spacing between the bubbles, from Brush tip shape:


After you set the brush as you want don’t forget to save it :


The final result it's a little more like the original.
But i found the easy way to do it :)

Monday, September 8, 2008

Just a few words

My English is not so good.
Looking on the Internet to find some new ideas to improve it I found this. You should read it because it’s really useful. There you will find other links to great thinks, too.

Back to my work in progress now.

I haven’t done much these days.
I did this wallpaper, but because is to simple, it has no meaning to write here about how I did it.


I started to read about colors and how to choose them to match.
I’ll write more about this when I’ll know more, for now I only have some ideas.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

The makings of a wallpaper

For my first real post I will show you what I did yesterday.
Someone gave me a picture and said they want a wallpaper that will resemble that.

So , here's the picture –

it's from TED talk on .... well you guessed it :What leads to success

First things first .
I opened PS and made ( the simplest thing you can do ) a black background :). Then I needed some human shapes like in the picture so I started googling. Unfortunately I came up empty handed so I had to do them from scratch.

At first I thought it would be difficult but soon realized that it was not the case. Here's how I did it :

I used ellipse tool for drowning the head and rounded rectangular tool for the rest of the body. Remember to put each part in separate layers so you can transform them, see for example, right hand in this picture. With rectangular tool you only can draw straight objects.


For the box I used rectangular tool, I draw 3 squares, each one in separate layers, like this :


On the squares marked with 2 and 3 I used Transform – Distort. While you distort it press and hold SHIFT key so that your shape will have a straight line. (use the shift key even if you only want to use Free Transform, so that you constrain proportions or whenever you draw straight lines) In this image the red lines you see is the rulers (ctrl + r or view - rulers) I used to position the squares with precision.

And this is the simple box :


Now select those 3 layers pressing down the CTRL key and then then press CTRL + E to merge layers into one layer so that you can easily move it around or apply effects to it.

All you have to do now is double click on the layer to open layer style and play around with them until you have the result you want.



With the heart shape was easier. I just used a custom shape and applied the step above.

And then I had to make the hammer. I thought I could use a custom shape again but I didn’t find what I want so I started googling again. I found an image with a hummer, this one and I transformed in brush by selecting it and go to Edit- Define brush preset. And then again I applied a style on it.

For the Focus image I used this and then transformed
into brush like I did with the hammer. The star is a custom shape, too.

For the Ideas I used these 2 custom shape :


The picture bellow is what it was looking like in version 0.1 beta :). Not exactly nice, and the client wasn't very happy with it. ( That success in the middle does look like something out of the 90s.)


Then I played with layers style and I came up with :


The problem was that the client said the shapes looked like they were some kind of balloons or something and the "Success" word was really fugly :)

After that I thought to make smaller icons and to put them around the “success”. So .. using a circle and the rulers I did this : ) . For the “success” word I just typed in and then I played again with layer style.

And the final version of my wallpaper :



This is what I ended up with. The client was reasonably happy with it :) .. and for a beginner I happen to think it's pretty good .

Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial, and there's more to come .

Design with passion.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Hello !

Hello all !

This is my first blog. I'm just now learning about web design and design in general.

Right now I'm learning Photoshop so most of my post will contain something about it.
Later on this might become a portfolio of sorts , or a place where people will come for some nice cool tricks in Photoshop.