Digital Studio Techniques Final Tutorial

Today you all get a 2 for 1! Retro AND abstract! (and a little grungy)

A bit last minute but what the hell. I think it was worth the 8 hours of work.

Oh, am I proud of this one.

I'll do a reflection on the class later...I've been sitting in this chair too long. But it was a good ride.

Original Poster Proj 4

I experimented with various geometric shapes, even at first using the above shape tiled straight across the page...which turned out to be too busy too murky too just...ew. I fell back on this design, making the shape in illustrator then moving it over to photoshop. Let me tell you once you start dealing with 18+ layers with blending modes, it only takes 1-2% to throw EVERYTHING out of wack and lead to 20 minutes of additional work.

Recreation of Retro Poster

Duplication of the original artwork was rather difficult since each layer and color built off of each other.  Using Illustrator, I built the general shape of the shards, along with the general gradients before importing them into photoshop, then adding adjustment layers, along with highlights. There are also Cyan, megenta, yellow and green layers beneath everything as well as a base 50/50 grey.

My take on it will uploaded in a few hours, once I you know, complete it.

As for the final, I'm currently experimenting with various techniques to produce a concise work.

Ok, So this looks interesting...

Aging in Photoshop? Possibly.

I found a very interesting image of a half old/young pres obama, been looking into the techniques required to make it. I haven't quite decided if I want to pursue it or not but not ruling it out. I'm going to do some more lurking to see what else I can find that peeks my interest...

Bottle Bottle Making

Woot! Finally got this project finished. It was a lot more time consuming than expected. What you see is maybe 8hr work today? But I like the final result a lot so I have no complants.

Not so much of the time was spent to get the image together but more of the tweeking of the various layers to make it look exactly the way I liked. The first steps, as recommended by prof Babcock, were taken in illustrator to get the bottle shape right and nice and flowing, then it was over to photoshop! Trying to preserve a constant shading across different layers, shapes was a pain. The main bottle shading was much easier than expected to be honest, just various shapes filled with white and red, then blurred to oblivion, simple, but it gave the bottle the shading that I was looking for. To give the strong lighting effects I did a lot of gradient overlays though the different shapes, which nailing down the right shapes was more difficult than expected. I most definitely went to the store and got some cheap wine (legally! for the first time) for reference, which also helped quite a bit.

Bottle Rendering/ Making

As stated in my previous post, my next project is to produce a realistic looking bottle. Though my research I discovered that there are two main ways to go about it, to generalize it a lot the two different methods are photoshop and illustrator. Below are my 2 takes on the techniques, and it was more of a practice than a full blown work of art, so they will be lacking in some detail, but the gist of the techniques are there.

For the photoshop take on the wine bottles, it includes a lot of gradients to get the shading down. First you start off by drawing half the bottle and mirroring it, as doing anything else is likely not to replicate it perfectly and it is quite noticeable(trust me) To get the general lighting you make some red and white rounded rectangles and then with a liberal use of gaussian blur it makes some very nice soft lighting. For the labels are mainly made using gradient overlays, which required a lot of fine touching to make it look fairly realistic. A lot of tweeking followed to produce the results that you see.

 

This was my take on making an actual 3d rendering of a bottle. As you can see above you start out with a path and use the 3d revolve to make the flushed out shape. I was less than impressed with this technique, not only was it touchy as hell, the results were not as I liked, I lacked control to fine tune the shading and it just looks...meh. Also it was seriously taxing on my computer system which just added to the frustrations. the only advantage that I honestly saw was the fact that you can make a open topped bottle and have multiple bottles at various angles with fairly limited effort.

I decided that I shall make a fully flushed out photoshop version of the bottle, as the control that you have, along with the final product look awesome and high class. 

Dear liver, please forgive me for the abuse I am going to put you though

I finally remembered to upload these. Though these projects I learned that making something grungy is rather difficult, not so much in making the actual effect but walking the fine line of making it look vintage vs just over the top dumb. Also I discovered that adding multiple grunging effects is not a good thing...I have multiple images that I didn't upload that just looked shody because of the layering that I applied.

As you can see I tried my had at making a nice orignal vector and fast discovered that my pen work needs, well a lot of work. I was originally planning on taking a few other various images and making nifty vectors but soon grew frustrated when it didn't come out to my liking. I feel back on a technique that I discovered in which you take an image, and through various legacy brightness and contrast settings in photoshop you can produce a fairly unique image, throw it into illustrator and get a nice vector. For the reproduction I relied heavily on render clouds along with various blending modes to get the grunge look. I was not pleased with the results. In a few of my other attempts I tried using various "grunge" brushes I found around the net but they were too...focused? On a distinct local area of the image as well. What I ended up using was a very light cloud render along with blending modes and a background texture to bring it all together.

Next up! I stumbled across a few very interesting wine bottle renderings. Fairly realistic as well. I will tackle those tomorrow since I am behind.

Grunge Poster Techniques

I really enjoy seeing grunge posters like the following, but it is always a delicate balance between making it look.."dirty" vs simply trashy following are a few examples.

Some of those are better than others but the concept remains the same. Take fairly clean and simple images(mostly vectors) and combine it with a paperish colored background to make a fairly unique poster. I'm also going to take this time to touch up my skills with the pen tool, and most likely combine the pen and the brush tools. Some filters will be used from the looks of it as well. Results/proof of concept will follow shortly.

Light Effects Desktop

I used techniques developed though my earlier trial and error to produce the following. Most of the actual "glowing light" was achieved though various blending modes along with a bit of layering and liberal use of Gaussian Blur. To help get the smooth curves I used the pen tool with my tablet to get nice flowing paths then hit the check box next to simulate "pen pressure". I had a lot of fun playing around with the various settings on the brush tool, from scattering to brush direction. The amount of control that CS5 gives you is astounding. I cannot wait to do more projects with the tool, maybe look into making a few of my own brushes and seeing what else the tool is capable of.

Lighting Effects Recreation

This is my take on the lighting. I tried to take professor Babcock's tutorial and streamline it in a way that is easily replicated/duplicated. Also learned a neat feature about photoshop to make nice smooth strokes without using a tablet, you can make a path with the pen tool and simply stroke it with a nice brush to get the same(if not better) effect that you would with a tablet. You also have more control over it than you otherwise would if you drew directly with a brush

Advanced Digital Painting Tutorial

I'm sans tablet at the moment but once that changes I'm going to try my hand at this

Hey mom. Look what I found!

Now, Totally don't know how to do that...but I'm going to find out.

Back in action

Sourced from here. Thinking of doing more of something like bellow since it is more complex.

Continuing to look though.

Concepts/Ideas

I also saw this. Which looks really interesting, as I am always looking for ways to improve my digital painting skills.