I like to think I’m an excellent visualiser. I’ve got ideas floating around in my head, but when it comes to putting any of them down on paper or screen I struggle. Oh how I struggle.
There’s been a couple of freelance jobs lately where the end results were functional, but not all that pretty. I wanted to fix that, so I set about teaching myself how to make graphics that don’t suck.
I’d been following VectorTuts for a while but every tutorial they ran looked way out of my league. It took a long time until I saw one that looked simple enough for someone like me. Someone with only a basic knowledge of Photoshop.
And here’s my attempt:
Yes, I know there’s supposed to be a series of tears in the images, but I couldn’t bring myself to add them. Not because of any real difficulty mind, but because they just didn’t seem to fit into the image.
+100 experience points to brushes, gradients and angled text.
I’d been obsessing over grungy images with have a starburst in the background for a long time. But taking the steps to make one myself was difficult. In my searches for a tutorial on how to make a starbust I found about half a dozen different ways, each with varying levels of difficulty, before stumbling on this one.
Again, you’ll notice that I didn’t actually complete the tutorial. But I learned what I needed to from it, so that’s OK.
+100 experience points to starburst and grunge effects
The difficulty level of this one was somewhere around advanced to minor Photoshop demi-god, but I really wanted to give it a crack to really test my skills. The sharper eyed of you will noticed that I faltered right at the very beginning by setting up the canvas as a portrait, rather than landscape. I only picked up the mistake about three quarters the way through the tutorial. Embarrassing really.
I’d managed to fight my way through the first half of the tutorial, but it was getting harder and harder to continue. The wireless mouse I use is one of the earlier Logitech designs and weighs a tonne. I wasn’t able to get the smooth lines I was after by pushing that brick around. Progress up until this point was slow. It took me around three weeks to get to the halfway point. Then I got myself a graphics tablet and it changed my life. Grinding repetitive tasks could not be completed with a flick of my wrist. Curves lines were no longer reminiscent of 8-bit gaming, but where smooth as a baby’s ass.
I burned through the rest of the tutorial in a weekend.
The other thing slowly down the process was the file size. Each of the letters contains a wood texture identical to the background. I made the mistake of copying the 200megabyte background.psd file into each and every character. When I was finished the PSD weighed in at just a shade over 1.6gig. Just saving the file took five minutes. It was when I watched the video tutorial that I realised there was a better way of doing it. By duplicating the background layer as a clipping mask.
My attempt came out far darker than the example in the tutorial, I blame the CMYK settings on my monitor/copy of Photoshop for that. I need to investigate monitor calibration if I’m to do any more CMYK-based tutorials in the future.
+500 experience points to clipping masks, graphics tablets and lighting effects
To Be Continued?
I learned so much in just those three tutorials. I look at billboards now and can see what tricks and tools they’ve used when designing it.
I’ve got a list of future tutorials to run through, so expect a sequel to this post at some point. I’m still getting used to using the the graphics tablet too, so any opportunity to play around with it is welcome.
Once I’m at a level where I feel comfortable doing my own thing, then I’m going to give this site a total revamp. I’ve already started on the wireframe mockups, but that’s a post for another time.
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