I Love Designing

Images Used

These are the photos that I’ve used for this tutorial.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1107722
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1124484
Burnt Paper
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/501004
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/106059
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1133977
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/731511

Final Image

This is the final that we’ll be creating:

Step 1

Create a new document (600X600px) and paste in an image of an old paper texture. Call this layer ‘paper texture’.

Step 2

Now go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and reduce the saturation to -60, and increase the lightness to +80. This should give you a nice looking washed out background.

Step 3

Now paste in a portrait photo of a woman into the center of your canvas. Be sure to cut out the woman from her original background using the lasso or pen tool selection tools. Name this layer ‘woman photo’.

Step 4

Now go to image>adjustments>desaturate, to grayscale your photo. Then go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and increase the contrast to +85.

Step 5

Next I paste in an image of some burnt paper. Resize the paper so that the edge of the burn fits with the edge of your woman’s torso. I reduced my layer opacity on the burn layer in order to judge where these edges were.

Step 6

Now use your magic wand tool at 50 tolerance and click on the white part of your burnt paper image. Then go to select>inverse. This should select the dark part of the burn. Then create a new layer called ‘burnt paper outline’ and fill this selection with black. You can see the resulting shape below. After this is done use your lasso tool to cut away and fill in parts of the woman’s torso to fit with this burnt paper edge.

Step 7

Now select the dark parts of your image (the shadows of your woman and the black burnt paper outline). To do this go to select>color range. Then select ’shadows’ from the drop down list, and set selection mode to ’selection’. Finally increase ‘fuzziness’ to 200. Hit OK, and this should select the dark parts of your image (which are shown up as white in the preview box).

Step 8

Now with your selection in place go to select>save selection and save it as ‘mask selection woman’. Create a new top layer called ‘gradient overlay’. Then deselect. Now select a large paintbrush (100px), and set hardness to 0%. Then choose a nice bright/obvious color (I went with red) and paint over your woman’s facial features and parts of her hair.

Step 9

Now we want to apply a layer mask in order to fit the red paintbrush marks over the dark parts of the woman’s face/hair. To do this go to select>load and load your previous selection (’mask selection woman’). Then with your selection in place go to layer>add layer mask>reveal selection. You can see the result of this below:

Step 10

Now right click on your paintbrush layer and go to ‘blending options’. Apply a gradient overlay, with using the settings shown below. This should turn your red overlay into a nice gradient transition, giving a spot of color to your woman’s face.

Step 11

Now reduce the opacity of your paintbrush layer to 70% to make the coloring more subtle.

Step 12

Now paste in a photo of a newspaper headline over the woman’s body. Use the same technique of loading the selection and applying a layer mask to fit the photo properly to your woman’s shape.

Step 13

Now change the layer’s blend mode to ‘hard light’ and reduce it’s opacity to 90%. Also use a large, soft eraser brush to erase away the edge of the newspaper, as the photo cut off the top unnaturally. Erasing the top edge subtly should also give the newspaper image some depth.

Step 14

Now repeat these steps and add more photos over the woman’s body/hair. For the other photos keep the layer’s blending mode’s at ‘normal’, as you only want the bold newspaper headline to be a really harsh light.

To blend the images nicely together do 3 things:

Reduce their layer opacities to around 40%
Erase their edges using a large, soft eraser brush
Desaturate them.

Step 15

Now I want to improve the gradient color overlay over the woman’s face/hair. I change the light green part of the gradient to a reasonably dark blue, and then use my paintbrush to paint in a little more over the edges of the woman’s hair, so as to extend my gradient overlay effect.

Step 16

Now merge your burn paper edge with your woman photo layer. Reduce the merged layer’s opacity to 87%. This should make your image look overall more subtle.

Step 17

Now create a new layer above your newspaper image layer and use a large, soft black paintbrush (30% opacity) and paint in a subtle shadow, making the newspaper get darker near it’s bottom. Then apply the selection/masking techniques shown earlier to fit the shadow to the woman’s body.

Step 18

To finish off I add some nice details, including the Swirl 2 Brush from QBrushes and a handwritten style heading using the free font Dirty and Classic

And We’re Done!

Obviously much more can be done with these techniques and you can come up with some really complicated compositions. However, hopefully this tutorial taught you some cool techniques for you use in your own designs!

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What a Year!

Looking back, 2008 (at least from the end of June onwards) has been a crazy year for me. Launching PSDFAN turned out to be a great decision, and the site has gone from strength to strength. It’s also handy to make this post today as it was the site’s 6 month anniversary a couple of days ago. I just wanted to thank all of my loyal readers, subscribers and contributers for all their support. Seriously, without you all this place just wouldn’t work.

I thought that rather than drone on I would give a quick summary of the past 6 months, and let you see the best of over 35 tutorials and countless other posts.

JUNE

PSDFAN is officially launched! – Nobody has heard of PSDFAN before, but I pick up a few helpful comments from the blogging community and the site seems to be welcomed by all.

Time for a Grungy Text Tutorial – The most popular tutorial of the 2 published at the end of June, receiving over 40 comments to date. It seems that people appreciate a good text tutorial.

JULY

I start listening more to what my users want – I didn’t know what to expect from this suggestion format, but people started providing some really cool ideas for me to work into my upcoming tutorials.

July also saw my most popular tutorial to date – My exploding laptop screen tutorial has amassed 74 comments to date, and is still proving popular amongst designers. This is motivation for me to come up with unique, inspiring tutorials.

AUGUST

I take some inspiration from Justin Timberlake, and the resulting tutorial goes down really well – It’s obvious that people appreciate good lighting effects, so long as they are integrated into unique, striking overall designs.

I start to provide more freebies for my loyal readers – This paper texture set is well received, and motivates me to provide more and better freebies for people.

SEPTEMBER

I write my first proper drawing tutorial – It turns out that a lot of people wanted to know how to draw a photo realistic wine bottle from scratch. This kind of tutorial takes far longer to write, and is very detailed, but I’m planning more like it for the future.

I start experimenting with roundup posts – Whilst my roundup of the 25 best drawing tutorials doesn’t receive a ton of comments, it does get stumbled A LOT, which is partly responsible for September drawing in a massive 120,000 unique visitors.

OCTOBER

October is a very busy month for me personally, but I manage to crank out a few nice tutorials – This tutorial on creating a firey guitar is detailed and hopefully practical for people.

I launch the PSDFAN Flickr Group, hoping to grow the great community here.

NOVEMBER

PSDFAN hosts it’s first contest (of many to come). – It goes down really well and all prize winners are happy.

November is the month for quality interviews – This interview with Fabio Sasso is a real insight into a talented designer.

Other landmarks include breaking 1000 RSS subscribers, launching our wallpaper section and starting up daily image inspiration.

DECEMBER

December offers readers a tutorial to create Christmas Wrapped Text – This festive tutorial makes it into quite a few roundup posts on other blogs

I also compile every great photoshop lighting tutorial ever – this HUGGGE roundup of 75 awesome tutorials is in my opinion PSDFAN’s greatest resource within one post, although it doesn’t receive as much attention as I’d expected.

I try a more ‘article’ like format and decide to discuss bold typography. – This post makes the front page of delicious and also gets stumbled a lot, drawing in a huge amount of traffic.

2009?

So what about 2009? Well despite all of the great achievements of 2008 I feel that in many ways the site has been plagued with bad luck. I’ve had several internet downtimes (including right now, as I’m forced to type from my friends house until my connection is back up on the 8th). I’ve also really felt the pressures of academic work, and sadly this site has had to suffer. However! The good news is that I only plan on making things better. A few things that I have planned for the near future:

The PSDFAN redesign has been designed, and is currently in the development stage, expect to see this go live soon!

With the redesign will come a members area, which will provide useful tutorial files and also some great community features.

I’ll be growing the community far more in the new year, from giving more precedence to our Flickr Group, to including a user link feed. I’ll also be accepting guest posts, which should increase the number of updates.

There will be far FAR more tutorials, especially after I’m done with mid-January exams. I know that I’ve not had the time to write quite as many recently, but the tutorial-inspiration post balance will be corrected.

Flickr Group Roundup

As the Flickr Group smashed the 100 members mark not long ago I figured it was time for a roundup of my favorite designs. The group is now home to almost 500 awesome designs, so please go and and submit yours today!

What do you Want to See?

In the new year I’m extremely keen to listen to what my users want in terms of content, or anything else. I’ll be hosting a couple of polls to gather this data, but until then I’d really appreciate and suggestions, ideas or comments you may have.

Its the Halloween season again and in light of that (and the fact that I just seen some awesome 3D carving on the Food Network Challenge show) I wanted to showcase 54 of the most amazing 3D pumpkin carving sculptures. And for those of you who get so inspired by this post, at the end I will post up a link to a picture tutorial on how to do these yourself. So, without further waiting, here are 54 of absolutely STUNNING 3D Pumpkin Carvings. (click the images to view the pumpkins in full size).

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO HIGH SERVER LOADS THE IMAGES BELOW ARE NOT CLICKABLE. THE FULL IMAGES CAN BE SEEN IN THE CARVERS RESPECTIVE PORTFOLIOS LISTED IN THE BOTTOM OF THIS ARTICLE. THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY WEBSITE AND PLEASE SUBSCRIBE FOR FUTURE UPDATES

All of the credit to these marvelous pieces of art go to Scott Cummins from PumpkinGutter.com and Ray Villafane from Villafanestudios.com Please be sure to check out their websites for more amazing artwork with pumpkins as well as more traditional artwork (Ray is a sculpture artist for DC Comics which you can see here and Scott has a vast amount of illustration and watercolor skill displayed on Outside the Lines)

Picture Tutorial for carving 3D Pumpkins

Follow this link as Ray Villafane shows you exactly how to carve a crazy 3D Pumpkin on his website. (on a side note, a big congratulations to Ray for winning the Food Network Challenge with his amazing pumpkin carving abilities. $10K is a nice chunk of change and he definitely deserved to win).

What do you think of these pumpkins?

Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think of these pumpkins. They’re awesome right? Awesome enough do deserve a stumble thumbs up? What about a digg or delicious tag? Maybe even a design float? I hope so, because I’d love to have you do any of these things I just mentioned

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Halloween is my favorite time of year and this post was so much fun to do. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Designers should have at LEAST 1,000 fonts on their computer and if you aren’t lying to yourself, you’re like me and have closer to 2,000 (the last time I counted – a month or two before). Maybe you have 100 or more paid fonts mixed in with your 1000+ free fonts, but do you have all of these? If not, you should! I went through dafont on a hunt to find 40 of the best free grunge fonts. So here is a list of 40 free fonts from DaFont that you MUST HAVE!

If you know of a type of font you’d like me to hunt down for you and make a list of, please let me know and I’ll do my best to get a list together for your favorite font type.

40 MUST HAVE Grunge Fonts From DaFont.com

1. KingThings Extortion
   
2. Trashco
   
3. A Bite
   
4. Sidewalk
   
5. Epoxy History
   
6. Birth of a Hero
   
7. Killed DJ
   
8. [ANK]*
   
9. Ambulance Shotgun
   
10. Ultimate Midnight
    
11. Bleeding Cowboys
    
12. Green Piloww
    
13. Marcelle
    
14. Refuse Trip
    
15. 1942 Report
    
16. GasMask
    
17. Toy Soldiers
    
18. Pointy
    
19. Karabine
    
20. Grutch Shaded
    
21. Desperado!
    
22. Frakturika
    
23. La Fraktouille
    
24. The King and Queen
    
25. Porcelain
    
26. Santos Dumont
    
27. Fountain Pen Frenzy
    
28. Jamaistevie
    
29. Fail
    
30. DJ Gross
    
31. FFF Tusj
    
32. Positiv A
    
33. Carboncillo Pallo
    
34. 28 Days Later
    
35. Ginga
    
36. Ascent 2 Stardom
    
37. Dirt 2 Death
    
38. Chicago House
    
39. Urban Sketch
    
40. Heroin 07
    
    

For those of us in the design community, we all know about the new digg-like design site Vot.eti.me which is a product of the ever popular Styl.eti.me If you haven’t seen vot.eti.me yet, go check it out. Now, the reason I am writing this post on the blog is to let you know that I’ve updated the sociable plug-in which was originally created by Peter Harkins and maintained by Joost de Valk since early 2008. The plug-in now not only includes vot.eti.me in the options panel, but it also makes it one of the default options. The original had the following as the default options:

• Digg
• Sphinn
• Del.icio.us
• Facebook
• Mixx
• Google

For those of us who design for a living or run design blogs, I know that there should be some better default options built into the plug-in to better suit our target visitor. So now the plug-in is defaulted to show the following:

• Vot.eti.me
• Stumbleupon
• Design Float
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Twit This
• Email

If you think that the plug-in should be defaulted with any others, let me know and I’ll update it here. You can download the plug-in zip file below. Any questions/comments/tips leave me a comment and let me know.

DOWNLOAD NOW:
Download the updated Sociable Plugin

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all the readers here at PSDFAN. I hope that everyone has a great holiday. As part of the festive season I’ve decided not to do a traditional Christmas post, as I’m sure you’ve had enough Santa hats, Snowmen and Holly to last you until next year! Instead, I’ve compiled a super long post themed around ice/snow, as I felt that there was a lot of design potential surrounding these themes. I’ve compiled a ton of great tutorials, free brush/icon sets, textures, website inspiration, widescreen wallpapers and more! Enjoy!

Ice/Snow Tutorials

I’ve gathered some of the very best tutorials for creating ice/snow based designs.

Text Effects

How to Create an Ice Cold Poster with 3d Text
This is a nicely detailed tutorial that teaches you how to make an icy text effect and incorporate into a custom poster design.

Stunning 3D Ice Text Effect Tutorial
This tutorial teaches you how to make a great 3d ice text effect, which you can use to incorporate your text as part of an iceberg.

Ice Cold Text Effect
A simple, but effective set of text stylings to give your writing an icy edge.

Freezing Ice Text Effect
This tutorial is extremely simple, aimed mainly at beginners. However, it’s a quick and easy way to get a pretty awesome end result. Perfect for a quick winter design!

Photo Effects

How Funny the Squirrel Became the Snow Queen in Photoshop
Random concept, even more random title, but a nice example of how to turn your photos into winter masterpieces.

Photoshop Snowfall Tutorial (Video Tut)
This video tutorial is clear and informative, and shows you how to create an intense snowfall to give impact to your winter images.

Drawing

How to Make an Ice Cube
A reasonably simple tutorial, with a nice glossy outcome. The final effect actually made me thirsty!

Drawing a Snowman
A great tutorial, and a great effect. Learn how to create a detailed, yet stylish snowman illustration.

A Very Snowy Tutorial
This tutorial shows you how to draw your own custom snowflakes and then turn them into a cool Photoshop brush.

Christmas Snowy Night Sky
A relatively simply tutorial on how to create a clean looking Christmas night sky. Great for creating a backdrop for your festive designs.

Ice/Snow Free Textures

I’ve also compiled my favorite 10 ice/snow themed texture sets, featuring 16 excellent high resolution textures.

Web Design Inspiration

These designs all show great examples of winter themed work. Some seriously ‘cool’ examples here (sorry couldn’t resist the pun).

IceBreaker Template
This HTML Template costs just $15, but is definitely one of my favorites from Theme Forest. It’s super professional, and a great example of how ice/snow doesn’t have to be festive or cheesy, but can be the basis of a beautiful design.

Daily Challenge
The Daily Challenge website uses a subtle snowfall design in their header. They have blurred each snowball varying amounts to create depth, and kept the effect very faint in order to not distract from their content too much.

Icons and Brush Sets

Free Snow Icons
IconsPedia offers a great variety of snow themed icons that you can download for free.

Snow Prints Brush Set
This great free brush set offers 4 snow print brushes to create a truly unique design.

Snowflakes Brush Set
This brush set includes several awesome snowflake designs.

Widescreen Winter Wallpapers

As a designer I like to work on a larger screen resolution, but unfortunately this limits my wallpaper choices. However, if you’re suffering from the same problem don’t worry! I’ve compiled my 10 favorite winter wallpapers, all of which are available at multiple widescreen resolutions (the smallest of which is 1280X800). Enjoy!

Most people think of web design as a graphic art.  This is not always the case.  I have never seen a website that does not have text on the page some where and this text is crucial to a quality web site layout.    Choosing your font, color, and other text attributes will alter the whole look and feel of any website fast!

The point is that you should alwasy take into consideration how many, how large and where your text blocks are going to be, because the flow of a site is largely created by the text not the fancy pictures used.

So when it comes to web design, text may be just as important as your images, make sure to utilize your complete web layout by streamlining your text and balancing the page the same way.  We find that using a css stylesheit can really help when it comes to changing your content designs, so you may try this as well.