Photoshopping My Guitar

Once upon a time, back when I was a little childish artist, I used MS Paint to painfully crop out an image of my guitar. That day is long gone, and the data with it.
Luckily, the photo still survived... so...
I went and PSed it. Isn't it wonderful?
I have my guitar at my disposal for anything I want to do with it.
Problem is, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do.
There's a mountain of potential, and I want to make use of it.

I've already played around with making custom brushes - I can make a million different colors and sizes and shapes of guitar randomly... I was being silly with that...

I'm just not 100% sure what my next piece of art will involve, and I don't know how to incorporate it. I'll have to think...

I can use just the outline for an abstract concept piece, and maybe warp it. Who knows...

Anyways, that's the latest project. I made a random monkey brush for my brother Bradley. He's a monkey nut. It's rather creepy to generate an possibly infinite number of smiling monkey faces.

I have two new brushes as of today... I wonder what I'll do next... I don't have anything big on the agenda. I still suck at typography, but I'm getting better... I may do some neat vector thing if I can find an inspiration.

I'm still trying to decide what to do for my blog for April...

BubbleWorks

'BubbleWorks' ...
is the name of my newest art piece. It looks better full-size, as usual, but For what you already see it's not too bad. It was fun. More of a toy than a piece of art.
I didn't learn anything. I hated the tutorial. It was one of the ones I listed yesterday. Another one was dumb, too. I didn't even try it.
I have two left to look at, and if they're worth what they appear to be, I'll have something to show next time. We'll see.

Anyways, the things I covered in this were tricks like inventing a layer style and copy-pasting it to multiple layers. You'd be surprised how much spice that can add without significant effort. It all adds up pretty quick. I played with designing my own brushes for it. Nothing significant, though.

One thing I did learn significant today, however, is that you can make a shape with selections, and modify them, especially with free transform. Then you can fill them with a color, a gradient, and add layer styles to your heart's content!

Using layer styles and old/plain brushes often feels like cheating. It can do wonderful things, but it's easier to be proud of your work when it's your concept or creation. My Feeling Lucky Four-leaf clover (and background brush) were all from stuff I did myself with the pen tool. I can credit it all to my own idea. I'm proud of that one. I did good. If you're ever doing art you want to have value, at least to you, keep that in mind.

Stroking Paths and Heartache

I'm working on doing something for Valentine's Day.
I do live in a bit of fear of it, though... Let's just say it will be the best or the worst day ever, and I hate uncertainty.

It's eating at me.

I'm working on a piece that's rather anti-valentine, though it didn't start out that way.
I guess it's just a mood thing.
We'll see what happens - I'm optimistic something significant will happen with it.
It's late, and I'll finish it another day.

Maybe you'll see it next time!


I found out how to use the stroke path again. I hadn't been able to fix it in ages.
I had to turn the internet upside down to figure it out.
To follow along a pen-tool path with the brush previously used,
right-click with the pen tool and select "stroke path...", check "simulate pressure", and hit ok.

that's the basics.
the problem is, in order for it to fade at the ends, you have to go to the brush menu and check/open shape dynamics, and set the size jitter (leave all bars at 0) control to "Pen Pressure".

It makes beautiful sweeps and arcs.
So as not to leave you empty-handed for today, here's a link to an easy and pretty example:
Electrifying Energy Beams

Brush Experiments

I wasn't able to learn anything specific today that I hoped to.
I got a bunch of new brushes at qbrushes.com - a website I recently stumbled upon.
Today I did several experiments - as I usually do when I get new brushes.

They came out... interesting to say the least.

The first of these is Towering Flames. It's just a concept piece. I have been trying to successfully imitate fire for a long time. Nobody on the internet seems remotely good at it (without using source pics), so I'm rather pleased - it's the best yet, and makes me hopeful.
This second one I just did today, also. It's called Bearing it All. Perhaps it's a sign of my troubled heart... oh well. I'm perfectly happy... on the outside, at least. It's rather strange and shocking that such an abstract brush could have such an effect on me. It's still a decent piece, considering that I don't usually use perspective like this. Yes, the silhouette is actually me - from a photo.

Passing A Note

I didn't get this post done on time because I had a lot to do today. I was at a dance all night - it was a lot of fun, though - I made many new friends.
Passing A Note is the name of my new piece for today. It's a work based on my new knowledge of brushes.

I used a fade-off size/opacity jitter to make it go out into the distance.

To get the pen tool to stroke the lines like I wanted took some time... a nice-looking stroke path is hard to do - the natural two-way fade-off one that "simulates pressure" is almost impossible to get to happen, even when instructed how to by the internet. There's just too many things that can screw it up. Luckily I didn't need it, but I need to figure out how to get it to work eventually.

There's a beautiful "fractal" trick I discovered a little while back - I got it to work on a music note - that's where the inspiration came from here.

Also, I just found the tune for the song I'm going to write. I'll cover that tomorrow, though.

Eliza's Nebulae

Yay! I love projects that aren't an entire flop! This one did okay.
This evening I spent the whole time on the phone with a dear friend, and afterward I was sitting on the couch in the quiet living room - everyone was gone at the time. My laptop was sitting there. I looked at it. It looked back at me. I thought to myself... hmm...

I opened it to my FireFox and there it was! The perfect tutorial. If anyone's interested, you can find it here at PSD Vault. It's a rather silly how-to-make-a-nebula thingy, but I like my end result. Keep in mind tutorals are guidelines (I don't keep the rules) , but it covers basically how I did it.

I did the first main piece twice however, rather than using the clone stamp as suggested. I thought his clone stamp use was rather lame. You have to be more subtle than that when using the clone stamp, else the reoccurences make it repetitive and yucky.

The tutorial asked you to make a new brush - I added it to my personal collection.
It's a neat little grainy star maker.
I also used my own brush trick on the coloring part - I used a giant blue soft brush with color dynamics. If you understand color dynamics (see The Brush Technique How-To if you're curious) you can use good colors, without consciously deciding specifically what to use. Plus, I love randomness!

The Brush Technique How-to

I have had trouble coming up with good Christmas-themed works.
I've been working on this pathetic little ornament, but I still don't like it. I hate to go without a new picture, but I've come up with a solution. I'll have several next time around. I promise.

It's not very hard to make sparkles and ornaments and ribbons - all you need is a little creativity. That's where I have trouble - I'm a total robot when it comes to creativity. I hate doing things from scratch. I hate it. It drives me nuts if little things aren't perfect or if they're permanent. I like to keep my options open.
Oh well. I'm just going to have to get over it - and the sooner the better.

Today I'll cover brushes and technique.
You need to know this definition- I didn't until recently.
Jitter = a randomness generator
a size jitter makes the same thing in different sizes randomly.
an angle jitter rotates things to different angles randomly.

The brush menu (top right, window>brushes, or F5) has magical properties. you can do all kinds of things with it. Open it with the brush tool selected...

---Brush Tip Shape - an expanded version of what you see when you right-click.
Here you can flip it over the X and Y axes and rotate it to any given angle. You can change the spacing, which spreads a scattered(read on) brush out.
---Shape dynamics - contains jitters of size, angle, and "roundness"
Along with spacing(see Brush Tip Shape), size/angle jitters can be your best friend.
---Scattering - scatters the brush everywhere. Great for sparkles, etc.
You can toggle whether both axes are scattered, and can increase the count (w/ jitter) of the brush.
---Texture - applies a texture (image pattern) to a brush.
You can control the properties of the texture, particularly the scale.
---Dual Brush - applies a brush-to-your-brush.
Using it is a bit tricky - It's best to find a bigger or smoother brush and set a smaller or more random brush as dual. If you succeed with it you'll get wild results.
---Color Dynamics - a color property jitter.
It has Fore/Back color jitters with Hue, Sat. and Brightness. The Purity jitter is the most important with the latter two - it regulates the amount of blacks and whites.
---Other Dynamics - the opacity and flow jitters.
They'll randomize how solid it comes out.
---Noise, Wet Edges, and Airbrush -These are pure property-less special effects.
They come in handy, too, so experiment with them as well.
---Smoothing - makes a drawing tablet's strokes less sharp
---Protect Texture - ensures that all of your different brushes use the texture that you specified.

Wallpaper and Brushes

I haven't done too much in PS today.

I've been needing to change my blog background for the wintertime, though.

I want to make a snowy wintery one, like Lee did at Leetopia.
It'll be cool when it's done, but I've been kinda stumped as to how to start.
It'll come to me when it's time, I guess...

I've been finding cool wallpapers for my laptop... I wish I could show them, but they really aren't mine to share... let's just say Flickr and DeviantArt have many wonders...

So... yeah... I've been expanding and renaming my brushes. I will probably get on it today... I'm excited to get started... after this, I will get a Christmas one going for December.
So I finally have Photoshop projects to do... and I'm ready...

Brushes Galore !!!

For all my amigos out there who play in photoshop, there are lots of cool brushes for you to find at DeviantArt.
From the DeviantArt Home, on the left menu,
click: resources > application resources > photoshop brushes.

If you click on them, and then click download (on the left in the pages), you can use them in your artwork... they're really cool!

I used to use them a lot, but I haven't in almost a year... I forgot how cool they are.
Try doing a search for lightning, grass, fire, water, flowers, hearts, grunge, vector, stars, plants or trees, leaves, splashes, blood, clouds, smoke, fractals, abstract... the list goes on and on.

once you download them, extract the .zip file if it's in one, and put the ".abr" brush file in (assuming you're using CS2, if not, go to whatever alternative folder name):

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Brushes

If you put it in this folder, when you right click while using the brush, and click the arrow in the top right of the popup menu, it will be under your list of brushes to use as you please!!!