Day 151: Gradient Map

This is a photo I took on my roadtrip through Nevada. It's a desolate section of the 6 West. I applied a gradient map to the image using a deep blue and a light blue mixed with black and white. I also masked off teh yellow stripes and applied a hue/saturation to bring out more of the color. If you look off into the distance you can see the text I placed at the end of the road.

Day 150: Grunge Rock Poster

 Once again I spent way too much time on this. I had to extract the model from the background of three different images before I began work on the actual piece. I struggled getting the hair right. I need to find a faster way to extract hair naturally.

On a positive note I found a stock photographer on Deviantart that is fantastic!!!



Tutorial Link

Day 149: Barney Calendar

Alright, so maybe I'm a little obsessed with my dog. I made this calendar of Barney for Tracey. I printed each month on photopaper and cut them down to fit in a CD case for displaying. I can see using this type of layout for quite a few gifts for several different people (although I may have to swap out the pictures of my dog... well maybe :)

Day 148: Flaming Car

I download to sets of brushes for flames and lines. My favorite part was using the gradient to create a noisy chromatic scale and then distorted to created speed lines.

Tutorial link.

Day 147: 60's Tracey Poster

From inside jokes and inside knowledge, coupled with another one of my favorite subjects, this was a tremendous amount of fun to make.

Tutorial link

Day 146: Charlie Text

Here is a text portrait of my nephew Charlie. I created this by using a series of color selections. desaturation and masks. The text if from the poem "What little boys are made of". I had to tweak with the contrast quite a bit to get some of the shadows. I also had to eliminate the sky and horizon in order to get a clean outline of his head and shoulders. Overall, the effect worked nicely (plus the subject matter was cute!).

Tutorial link.

Day 145: Leather Texture

Leather from Scratch:. Stain Glass filter (twice), noise and lighting effects (omni and spotlight) then applied a hue/saturation. The best part was learning about the adding multiple lighting sources with the Omni direction filter (small light bulb in preview window).

Tutorial link

Day 144: 80's Stars

 A very simple technique but time consuming. I realized after I finished that I could do this one much faster if I merely made three or four sample stars with color lines and then duplicated and transformed them. A well, live and learn.

Tutorial link

Day 143: Comicbook Barney

Comic retro art using Barney and quote from Wolverine... pure poetry.

Tutorial Link

Day 142: Abstract Circles

I tweaked out waaaaaaaaaay too long on this one! The effect was created using a series of circle selections with a gradient overlay, a drop shadow, stroke and and pattern overlay. For the pattern overlay I created a checkerboard and dot pattern. It too much long to do than I expected but I like the look and color scheme of the final piece. I should use this somewhere for work... perhaps as an element on a poster to attract kids to the class... wait that sounded creepy :)

Tutorial link

Day 141: Dumbledore's Army

Thoughts of Tracey and the sounds of John William's opening music fill my head...

Day 140: Golden Text

Another tutorial to create gold.

Meh.

Tutorial link

Day 139: Grunge Metal

Once again I found a text effect that isn't that spectacular but the fun I had with the background was great. I used two different metal textures, a font called Kremlin and some overlay blending mode action. The lines were created using a simple white rectangle with a drop shadow.

Tutorial link

Day 138: Digital Dog (or Barney Bookmark)

I really like the concept of this technique but I'm not sure if I got it to work. The brush dynamics (scatter and texture) of the clone stamp and the brush for masking  were something I hadn't used before. I think with some more practice and finesse I could create a more polished piece. I may have to revisit this one.



Tutorial link

Day 137: Electric Text

I'm going a bit old school and trying some of the text effect I seen my CGD kids do. This one is heavy on the Wind filter. The Polar cooridinates effect created a weird gap around the Y. I had to duplicate a portion of the white fringe to add along the side of the letter to avoid have a large gap between Y and 1.

To finish it off I applied a random gradient, cranked up the hue and saturation and set the blending mode to Overlay.

Tutorial link

Day 136: Orange Zipper

I found this lesson and photos in a UK magazine called Advanced Photoshop. I'm happy with the overall result and the compositing effect was interesting to work with however the techinque is way too dependent on the photos. For example, I had three pictures of the orange; one on a blank background, one with a zip actully taped to the orange and one with the orange in grass. In order to have the zipper work on any other image I would have to have a picture of an object with a zipper taped on it in order to get it to easily, and naturally follow the contours of the object. I guess my main frustration is the apparent lack of transferable skill I got from this tutorial since I can't see using what I learned without access to the stock photos. I could be wrong and might try it on another object but I doubt it.

Day 135: Tattoo and Image Tweaks

This was an interesting technique to apply a tattoo. It wasn't merely an overlay but several masked layers with an overlay(80%) and soft light (60%). I then applied a displacement map of the image prior to setting the tattoo. I changed the lighting quite a bit from the original image by first desaturating the picture then applying three adjustment layers (levels, brightness and curves). I then burned portions of the image to create more dramatic lighting.

I like the tattoo on his chin better than the one of his forehead. I should have looked for more vector brushes that would have worked better. Next time (and I'm sure there will be a next time) I find a better tattoo image.

This was a much smoother and more realistic effect than most tutorials on this topic,

Tutorial link

Day 134: Metal Text on Concrete

This tutorial was one of the weaker ones I've seen on PSDTuts. The text effect was nothing more than a gradient overlay with a stroke and drop shadow (and they even  forgot to mention the drop shadow). The texture of the text was a simple motion blur. I didn't care for the concrete texture technique (it looked like black painted concrete). I choose to apply a concrete texture of my own, apply a light source from the top right and then overlaid the texture created in the tutorial on top of mine and then dropped the opacity. I prefer the background that I created much more than the text or background from the tutorial. It was nice to use as a jumping off point but over all this tutorial wasn't really well developed.

Tutorial link.

Day 133: Grunge Wallpaper Text

Here is another text experiment (sans tutorial). I downloaded a font called GotHeroin.. cute huh!). I applied a bevel (chisel smooth) an outer glow and an inner glow. I dropped in a paint splatter texture that I merged with the wallpaper and red channel selection into a mask of the text and applied a light effect over the entire piece.

Day 132: Grunge Wallpaper, Denim(?), Stone(?) Text

I followed no tutorial on this one. I experimented with a drop shadow, inner shadow and bevel/emboss. I lowered the fill setting of the text to 30%. I applied a wallpaper pattern to the background, dropped a lighting effect on it and added a vignette to the top. I overlaid a desaturated texture on top of the text and applied a layer mask to each line to create the distressed texture in the text.

Day 131: Metal Text

Here's another layer style heavy text effect. The instructions worked for the most part until it got into applying multiple glows (it didn't work). I used another technique to get the background to work and applied my own vignette. Not bad but not great either.

Tutorial link

Day 130: Green Text, Funky Background

So the text itself is nothing special but the background was fun to tweak with. I applied some clouds and adjusted the blending modes to soft light. I then created my own gradient overlay on top of some difference clouds to create the color. I then masked the text so the color didn't run over it.

Tutorial link

Day 129: Picture Perfect Pug

Benjamin is Barney's show quality pug friend (and older brother to Bella). The effect replicates that of an old Lomo LC-A camera. I didn't use the vignette technique from the tutorial (opting instead to create my own). The rest of the effect was from the lesson.

Tutorial link

Day 128: Kung Fu Pug

Here is an anime style picture of Barney's girlfriend Bella. She's a cutey!

Tutorial link

Day 127: Indented Text

This one was way too easy. I tweaked a lot with the "day text" that went way further than the tutorial asked for. Not a great look at all.

Tutorial link

Day 126: Restore Photo part Dos

Here is the second image I restored for him. This one is of his great grand parents. We found that they had their feet in the sand and a bottle of soda(?) which he had never noticed before.

Fun.

Day 125: Restored Picture

I had a former student of mine come in to get help restoring the last picture his family has of their grandfather. Here is the before and after.

Day 124: Illustrator Panda

Cutesy bear with a snazzy slogan.  Ahhhhh....

Tutorial link

Day 123: Grunge Girl Splatter

Here's another grunge, splatter brush effect. Much easier than the one I did of Disney Tracey (plus the Tracey picture was more fun to work with because of the subject matter). Still, the effect is fun and one that I'll undoubtedly use in other ways.

 Tutorial link

Day 122: Vegan Police logo

A former student of mine send me a blurry image of a t-shirt logo that he wanted in vector format. Here is my final design.

Day 121: Lost Text w/ Map

A simple text effect with a blur to simulate the LOST title effect. I found a map, tweaked the colors and dropped it into the background. Clean, easy and effective.