[art] No Models Allowed: Books About Figure Drawing From Your Head

3389.

I have drawn with a model. I, in my modest experience, have drawn in a life-drawing class.

Presumably my interlocutor knows what that is, but if there's any doubt, you know those drawing classes where everyone is arranged in a diverse semicircle around a raised platform where a real live nude model comes out and poses a lot and you have this easel with this big pad of newsprint and then everyone takes out a piece of charcoal or a stick of graphite or a light saber and starts furiously making marks with the whole of your arm over this pad and you're drawing something which looks vaguely like a naked person but could actually be mistaken for a frog, and the light saber pokes through the paper and singes the back of the head of the person in front of you and there's EMS and a trip to the emergency room for someone?

Well, I'm telling a bit of a fib there. Nobody ever called EMS. We were artists, dammit, we were tough. And light sabers are copyrighted anyway. And they don't actually exist. As far as you know.

Anywhoozle, to be serious again, it was quite an experience. You want to draw and if you're unfamiliar being in a room with a totally naked stranger, it's amazing how quick you get over this. Anyone who's ever been in the zone drawing knows this. The ecstasy of making those marks and experiencing the flow really overtake any nervousness you might have. I'm glad I did it.

After you get out of school, though, life-drawing class experiences come few and far between. Classes cost money, yo, and asking strangers on the street for volunteers leads to enquiries from the police. No bueno. It's a goal, then, to learn the human body well enough to be able to draw figures from those that may only pose in your minds eye.

Seriously (again), this is a goal of mine. It's something I nearly achieved in the past and an acme I really want to work toward. Drawing credible figures at the drop of a hat, literally if needs be, seems to me to be serious playing at art on an elevated level. And it's not that drawing with a model is a bad thing either; some of the best classic comic artists did it. But this is a powerful tool, and if you had the chance at a power tool, well, who wouldn't?

Currently I'm studying two books that deliver an artist's knowledge of anatomy in a way that you can adapt it to just about any situation. They really are good books, and I recommend them.

In The Classic Style

The two books take a similar yet divergent approach to the idea of drawing figures directly from imagination. They are Draw From Your Head, by Doug Jamieson, and Freehand Figure Drawing For Illustrators, by David H. Ross. The former comes from what I consider a 'classical' approach, the second, from a more 'modern' point of view.

Draw From Your Head is by Doug Jamieson and was released in 1991. It's a distillation of the system he taught at the New York School of Visual arts. As described, the essential difference between it and other system of anatomy visualization is that it starts with the skeleton, renders it down to a grammar of basic lines and shapes in accordance with the classic 8-head canon, then progressively drapes that simplified skeleton with simplified masses representing muscles, rather than starting with the muscled figure and working back to the basic. The student is encouraged to draw each at each stage and at the end of each stage, a new group is explored and added to the student's growing repertoire.

This sequence, near the back of the book, illustrates very well the progression from simplified skeleton, to dressing it with the muscular masses, to the ending fully-fleshed figure.

Along the way, the student is encouraged to get to know the muscle groups so there is awareness to back the practice of abstract shapes. The figures are most detailed.

In The Modern, Action Style

The second book, Freehand Figure Drawing for Illustrators, is very much geared toward the modern illustrator who wishes to draw from their head and illustrate for the modern comic book and graphic novel.

The author is David H. Ross, whose bio includes credits from Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, as well as storyboards for movies and consultation for television; this book is for the hot, fashionable constituencies and serves them with depth and erudition.

Ross' central trick is what he calls the glass mannequin, something illustrated on the book cover in good detail, which is his way of viewing the human body as a series of abstracted shapes which, once familiar, can be positioned in any number of ways, just like the wood mannequins adorning my own desk. Tellingly, though, we don't go there straight away, we start in on the one subject every decent art instruction book should contain: perspective. Given that this is a book aimed toward the comic and graphic novel artist, it's a good place to start; you get a skeleton of a world to place your action figures in. After a thumbnail of the freehanding process, we are introduced to the mannequin, then, once we get to know him/her, we go into the anatomy informing the mannequin, the details, the differences between male and female bodies, and how to put them all in motion and action.

We call him Manny.

So, two routes to the draw-from-your-head-mountaintop, two different ways to reach similar goals. The appealing thing about the idea of drawing model-less is that you are ready, at any time, to close your eyes, imagine something, and bring it out.

That's real User power, as Flynn might say. Totally worthwhile, it's a power tool for artists in the best way, and the prize of any artist's tool box.

For a strong modern artist's auto-didacting, I can think of few things better to have on your shelf than these two books.

[art] I'd Love To Draw: The Lost Andrew Loomis Treasure

3364.

First, a bit of a mea culpa, in the last missive about Loomis I said the next time we talked about him, we'd do a little more delving into the book Fun With A Pencil. We will, but this got under my skin, so we'll be going there first.

Of the number of art instruction books Andrew Loomis produced in his lifetime, there was still one out there that never made it, at least, not until the aegis of Titan Books arrived on the scene. This book, I'd Love To Draw, has been called a lost masterpiece and now it's here in all its rough beauty.

Just because it's unfinished does not mean it's undone, however. Titan and its collaborator, the award-winning illustrator Alex Ross, have taking the unfinished work and knitted it into a coherent and highly informative whole. The approach is different and rather refreshing; the rough drawings left behind by Loomis take on an illuminative quality that the best work-in-progress sorts of illustrations do.

I always love works-in-progress. Finished art is magnificent, and rightly so, but as someone with a technical eye it's a little like dissecting a specimen in biology. WIPs are the bone, sinew, and organic mattter of the work, and they have a rawness and vitality that sometimes teaches without words. I'd Love To Draw is full of this vim and vigor.

The book traces a familiar trajectory from the beginning building blocks to more advanced areas. Part one familiarizes you with basic forms. Part unleashes the learner to start trying different things and branch into cartoon-people drawing. Part three brings the aspiring artist to the level of artist who sketches for fun, and from there, as many artists know, all things are probable, or at least possible.

The drawings, as I mentioned, are rough and ready, but still communicate in the inimitable Loomis style, as does this spread that has to do with that essential artistic concept, perspective:

The spreads are bursting with the enthusiasm of a teacher who knows that if you pick up what they are putting down, you'll open yourself up to a world of wonder and fun, which is typical of the motivated art teachers I've met in my time.

If you work at it, you might do art with the perspicacity of this fellow here:

In the text next to the drawing of Einstein above you can see the insight which, at least partially, led to the gelling of the 'ball and clay' idea that informs the beginning of Fun With A Pencil.

The marginal notes, found through out the illustrations to plan the finished product, bring a definite sense of charm and unmistakable authenticity.

I'd Love To Draw was created some time in the late 1930s, so if it seems familiar, it's probably because it helped define much of the paradigm of the modern art instruction volume, in its simple-to-complex, friendly encouraging style. The idea of creating things out of blocks seems to anticipate works like De Rayna's How To Draw What You See, for instance.

If you go no further than getting this Loomis volume, then you'll be equipping yourself well for any sort of artistic path you want, be it for pleasure or for future profession. This be your gun and camera.

Publisher: Titan Books (October 14, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1781169209
ISBN-13: 978-1781169209
Retail: $39.95

[creativity] D.I.Y. Magic: Every Person Their Own Wizard

3352.

It seems a truism that a key to creativity can be upsetting your normal flow, forcing yourself to look at the ordinary in an extraordinary way, and it could sort  of indirectly follow from that that there is magic in the creative act, depending on how one looks at it. Certainly creation of something that wasn't there before is a sort of sorcery, when one considers the moving effect of art and anoints the artist the title of magician.

Anthony Alvarado (who we met at Linework 2 years back and who we got this clever little book from) has done a massively clever thing here. He has taken a range of techniques for hacking ones' own creative process and used the paradigm of the magic spell to create a grimoire for the creative mind, filled with adventures to take the creative soul on.

If the book D.I.Y. Magic: A Strange and Whimiscal Guide to Creativity would seem to take a lot on itself, it may be helpful, going in, to know that Alvarado encourages you to define the idea of magic as you see fit. This paragraph, in the Introduction, gives the reader a handle to grab regardless of what they may concieve of the supernatural:

The truth is we have all practiced a form of magic at one time, when we were children seeing images in the passing clouds. Remember lying on your back and watching faces appear in the sky? A puff of cumulus becomes the eye of some creature that melts into an alligator's, nose and then becomes fantastic dogs, castles, angels, cartoons of people and animals that waltz from one form to another. Images can also be seen in the hot coals of a fire, in the grain of wood beams, and on the surface of rippling water. The phenomenon is surely the reason why primitive man saw himself surrounded on all sides by the elemental spirits of all things - the sprites, nymphs, dryads, and sylphs of forest, river, and fire. And wasn't he richer for it? Now, of course we know better! But I propose that these same faculties lay dormant within us.

Alvarado's reliance on the paradigm of the magician casting spells and cantrips, then, is his clever and excellently effective way to remix that point of view and quite a few things you may have heard of, do a bit of alchemy on them, and come up with a new thing that makes nudging your creative self back into wakefulness as much or as little of an adventure as you want it to be, and expects you to define your magic your way, not his or anyone else's.

A good example is the cantrip for manifestation (a cantrip, he explains, is any spell that is quick and easy to do). The tools required are optimism, positivity, and and awareness of the ideas that you project upon reality, and the only thing it requires you to do is look at the world though that lens. If you were of a Buddhist bent, you'd probably say you were practicing mindfulness; a more spiritual sort might see it as the law of attraction; a more practical person would just think of it as paying attention. Using a positive outlook and letting your ideas guide you, for the few minutes that you do this, you'll be looking at the world in terms of what you expect or hope to see, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that you'll see more or less appropriate things as relate to whatever idea is informing you.

The book touches on quite a few concepts that you, me, and everyone else who's chased enhanced creativity have probably run across, but he remixes them into small adventures for the creative heart. A coin flip becomes an adventure in the good kind of chaos when you flip it and follow your intuition about which side came up, making your decision without ever actually looking at the coin. A tarot deck becomes a mind map when you make up your own trumps using whatever symbols you want and decide for yourself what they mean.

There are also some advanced experiments that require a bit of thought and preparation, but the book seems founded on the proposition that if a process doesn't speak to you, you aren't obliged to do it.

It's a delightful book even to leaf through and consider if you don't try anything, just meditate on the clever way he's taken a great deal of material on altering your perceptions to take advantage of the creative chaos within and made of it a whole new thing.

It's at least inspirational, and what creative doesn't need inspiring now and again?

Publisher: Perigee/Penguin
ISBN: 978-0-399-17179-6
US Retail Price:$15.00

Anthony's website is https://anthonyalvarado.net/

[design] Photoshop Masking Techniques Everyone Should Know

2826.Can you name them without looking at the app?
In case you can't, here they are:

1. Magic Wand
2. Quick Selection
3. Quick Mask
4. Lasso/Magnetic Lasso
5. Eraser
6. Pen
7. Layer Mask
8. Channels

They have various approaches to doing the same thing – selecting things for changing them. Select it, then effect it, goes the maxim. And some are better than others; the eraser is the one the noobs use then abandon as they soon find there are things like the layer mask that allow you non-destructively edit things, so you always have the original to go back to.
While, generally, I personally don't recommend the eraser tool the beauty of Photoshop is that it offers enough tools to do any one thing that you can approach anything the way it works best for you.
I found this nifty article at Spoon Graphics' blog that summarizes it all very nicely:
http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/articles/photoshop-masking-techniques-everyone-should-know#

[comic art] Creating A Dystopian-Future Comic Book Cover

2801 (Via Dark Horse Comics at the Book'o'Face) The Massive is a dystopian near-future comic series coming soon that is supposed to take place in an environment where the the race between global climate change has ended, and global climate change has won. There are previews available here and about.

The cover art, like any great comic cover art, hooks you in.

In this article at iO9, Brian Wood takes us through the creative process that led to that cover.

[design] Escape From Illustration Island

2405.Here's a great site I just stumbled on to.

Local illustrator Thomas James is one of those creative professionals that I think our chosen professions would die out without, because without such people we'd all feel completely isolated and alone. They don't believe the illustration or design world is a pie with only a limited amount of pieces to give out, but that you increase what's out there by sharing what you know.

His omnibus site is Escape From Illustration Island. It's the sort of site where he encourages community and shares what he knows about what's cool and what helps you go 'round to get 'round. He helps you fuel your passion.

I'm still getting to know and going round the site, but it sure looks good. It's quite inspiring and even though this might not be the most read blog around, if you stumble this way, I recommend it.

The amount of stuff requires more of a review than I have time to give it. The quality, however, is a high standard, and if nothing else, the sentiment is a winning one: No illustrator is an island, and he wants to help you build a bridge off yours.

How can you not accept a hand like that?

Also, these go into my links basket.

Technorati Tags: illustration, how-to, illustration resoruces, Escape From Illustration Island, Thomas James

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A Lens From Adobe Illustrator

1825.

Today, looking for something a little less intense than the 3D drawing I did the day before, I found yet another great adventure at VECTORTUTS; drawing an icon-worthy camera lens.

This lens has it all ... gray tones, rich translucent depths, but it's all layering circles on top of other circles, gradents, and opacity shifts. The only advanced technique was feathering out some of the shapes, and type on a path for the outside inscription:

I took a snapshot of some of the action along the way, so if you don't read the tutorial, you have some idea of why it works:

All we have here are a couple of circles shaded just so ... in this case, linear gradients at opposing angles. But it's really just shading that creates the illusion of a concave void, which is cool.

A great case made for knowing how art basically works along with the application skills.

Tags: how-to, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator CS3, Illustrator tutorial

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Playing Chess With Adobe Illustrator CS3 ... In 3D!

1824.

Today I played chess with Adobe Illustrator ... in more ways than one.

Anyone who's used the Adobe Illustrator CS versions knows that Illy can fairly keenly generate 3D volumes from paths you've constructed. And this is a good, good thing.

However.

The extra calculations the program will require your computer to do to make some effects happen may make you wonder if it's worth the bother, for those of us with PowerMac G4 computers and below, though the program itself runs just peachy in regular old flat-drawing mode.

Today, I attempted a drawing based on this tutorial at PSDTUTS's vector sibling called, predictably, VECTORTUTS. Follow the link to the tutorial I did. Here's what I got:

... which is not too bad, really, I think. This was done in Illustrator CS3. Included in the skill set are: paths, gradients, opacity masks, drop shadows, and 3D rotation.

Now, I mentioned that I played a game of chess with Illy two ways. One is alluded to in the drawing above. The other was a series of moves I had to work out in order to get the drawing rendered while I still have some youth left in me.

The tutorial had me making the two front white chess-pieces thusly:

1. Draw a path, which amounted to a profile of one-half the object.


2. Create a 3D object out of it by invoking the 3D Rotate filter.


3. Add a drop shadow, just so.


4. Copy the object, move it down and to the left just a tecth, go back to 3D Rotate, and specify a rotation sufficient to make the copy look like it's laying in its side.

Not really too advanced, as to process. But along the way, something happened. I reason this: When you add a drop shadow to a 3D object, Illy creates of it and the 3D object, a single, very complex group. When you're bucking around 3D object in Illy on a G4–even a dual core machine like mine–waits can be noticeable, but acceptable. But when you do it with a drop shadow effect employed, when you make the rotation, it has to analyze and render all items in the group, especially if you've added additional light sources. The complexity seemed to go up by a couple of orders of magnitude.

What it amounted to was that I wound up looking at this:

... for over a half and hour. Actually, I tell a lie: I went off, had a shower, got dressed, make a pot of coffee, and drank a cup of coffee. And the progress bar was still there, still working.

And, oh yes, I could tell it was working. Here's the CPU monitor when that was going on:

It makes you break a sweat just looking at it. By way of comparison, here's what it looked like when I quit the program right after aborting the rendering:

See? Just fell right off there. The greatly reduced histogram on the left is what we usually have to deal with.

I have always approached 3D rendering in Illy with trepidation. This has been a bother since CS2, so even though my computer is about three years old, I think it has as much to do with the fact that perhaps Illy isn't the greatest engine for 3D design out there.

But I did come up with a workaround. What it amounted to was duplicate and place all the 3D shapes, and THEN apply drop shadows to them. The lack of a complex group for Illy to deal with took a great deal of the load off the processor, thereby making shape generation much quicker (there's still an inconvenient pause, but it does work. Man, how I want to upgrade!)

So it was indeed a lesson, and it did teach some skills. Thankfully, I don't need to do 3D illustration much. By holding off on applying the drop shadow, I won that little chess match with Illy and my three-year-old PowerMac G4.

Of course, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it was chess that we were playing ... or Go, perhaps.

Tags: Adobe Illustrator CS3, Illustratory, Illy, 3D Vector Drawing, How-To

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How To: Making ZOMG Web 2.0 !!11!! Glossy Badges in Adobe Illustrator

1822.

This technique requires a bit of a trick in Adobe Illustrator with transparency blending.

One of the things that I find so humorous about "Web 2.0" is the way it's expressed as visual design. "Rounded Corners!" "Glossy Buttons" "Gradients!" The word beta pretty much everywere (doesn't beta mean not quite finished yet?)

But we digress. We've had all those for years now and it wasn't a web design philosophy. I'm not the only one who thinks so:

(via Wikipedia) Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the early days of the Web.[

But it does open up excuses to have fun in Illustrator and Photoshop. The layers and blending modes of the two programs allow the artist to come up with depth and dimensional effects that weren't doable even a short time ago, and will make you want to tear your eyes out of your skull if you try it in MS Paint. And now, you have to use 'em or you look like you're wearing 1998's designer jeans.

Two tutorials I recently read gave me quick and easy ways to create Web 2.0 badges ... you know, the ones with the jaggedy edges that tell you there's something afoot that's cool, or something. You can view them here. But, to get down to the nut, here's all it really takes:

1. Make the badge outline. Using Illustrator, get the Star tool. Drag out a star. As you're holding the mouse button down/pen pont to the tablet, press the up/down arrow on your keyboard to increase/decrease the number of points as needed, and (keeping that mouse button clicked down, still!) hold down the CMD key and drag back'n'forth until you get the length of points you want.


2. Copy that badge outline and paste it in place.


3. Using the pencil tool, create a quick, 1-up-1-down wavy line. Group the wavy line and the badge copy and use the Divide tool from the Pathfinder palette. Ungroup that and delete the bottom half.


4. Use Edit>Path>Offset with a small minus amount, say, -2 mm or -5 px or whatever is approprate, to shrink the top half left over (if you have a copy of that behind the newly-offset path, then delete that.


5. Fill the half-part with a white-to-black gradient. Adjust using the gradient tool ... you want it to nearly fade out at the bottom


6. Blend down using Screen (via the Transparency palette)

Et voila! You now have a nifty Web 2.0 badge with which you can beat your friends into submission. Put a snarky saying on it and Save for Web with GIF or PNG formats for the transparent background.

Tags: Web 2.0, sarcasm, adobe illustrator, how-to, tutorial

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Adobe Illustrator Extra Goodies: You Haz Them!

1821.

To an Adobe Illustrator power-user, this is nothing new. I'm not a power user yet, but I do know my way around the app I affectionately call Illy, and just like my advetures in Photoshop latterly, I'm working on sharpening my Illy skills up.

Illustrator is an image editor too, but it works on vectors. It's somewhat counter-intuitive from natural drawing styles, but once you learn Illy's ways and means, you can do amazing things (there's something about Illy, and that's a subject for a not-too-far-in-the-future epistle).

If you have Illy CS, CS2, CS3 or (and now) CS4, and you're on Mac, open a Finder window and navigate to your Mac HD/Applications/Adobe Illustrator (whatever)/Cool Extras/Sample Files folder. There is some great stuff in there, yo.

Now, open the Crystal.ai file. This is what you'll see:

Is that not gorgeous? You just about want to reach into your monitor and pick it up. But it's all paths, fills, gradients, and blending modes (need it also be added that the artist, Miyamoto Yukio, is evidently a master of photorealism?)

Let's take a good close look at one of those marbles in the water. Here's one I isolated:

The reflection on the left side now starts to resolve into individual shapes. These are actually filled paths, but when viewed at the proper scale, the eye naturally blends these together, and it looks like the reflection of the side of the glass and the marbles around it.

The shadow covering the lower 2/3rds of the marble is like this (I turned Smart Guides on, which highlights all sorts of nifty things when you use it:

(the blue-green boundary around the gradient fill is because of the Smart Guides. Like I said, Nifty! Clicky here to embiggen) So you see here that the shadow of the marble is just one big path and fill. Gradient fill, to be exact (check the fill box at the bottom of the tool bar to find out)

Adobe Illustrator is ideally qualified to create photorealistic illustrations for things like icons and the ever-popular glossy-glassy buttons that Web 2.0 has made ever-so-fashionable.

I'm looking for Illy tutes that have done the same thing that the Photoshop tutes I've found do; limber my mad skillz and show off just what these amazing programs do.

And if you're lucky enough to have Illy, look for the Cool Extras folder. You won't be sorry.

Tags: Adobe Illustrator, Illustrator tutorials, digital art, digital illustration

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The Photoshop Compass

1818.

Another day past, another PSTUT down. This time, we created a rather spiffy looking compass, perfect for use as an icon in an application or just looking at and going oooh, preetty!:

That is really nifty, no? The real takeaway from this illustration is the ways one can make a 3D look from two-d shapes, gradients, and shading.

Note the shiny spots along the side of the compass. The first thing that was done was creating an ellipse and filling it with gray. Then, I copied this and moved that up. Using guides, I created a rectangle between the two ellpses, and filled that with a gradient. After putting in (and Gaussian-blurring out) more white for reflections, without actually creating a 3D shape, I had a 3D look.

Technically I implemented skills used in the other tutes ... including command-clicking layers to load them as selections, and rocked the blending modes. Shadows and layer effects are used liberally to give depth and reality, and the selections are moved this way and that based on the other layers to keep things in the right sizes.

All the instructions needed to produce this ... inlcuding a PNG of the compass dial ... are available at the tutorial site.

In our endless search for interesting tutes to keep our PS skills sharp, we've concluded that PSTUTS is a worthwhile stop.

Tags: Photoshop, photoshop tutorials, photoshoppery

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The Photoshop Glass Of Beer

1815.

Fresh from our quest to find the perfect little green apple (God, as B.J. Thomas said, didn't make 'em), we find that a beer would be a very fine thing.

Photoshop can help again. This PSTUT tutorial, in 22 steps, enabled me to come up with this:

Which is a fine glass of Pilsener. Now, Pilsener isn't my favorite beer, but absent any other sort, it'll do nicely.

Once again the tutorial has us isolating areas for layer effects by CMD-clicking (CTRL-clicking in Windows) a layer thumbnail. This loads the non-transparent pixels of the selected layer as a selection. Say, for instance, you've made just a simple square of whatever color on its own layer, and you're going to create another layer, and you want to create a fill or effect and align it with the square. By CMD-clicking the layer thumb, the square shape – the nontransparent pixels on that layer – are loaded as a selection. This saves a great deal of time over marqueeing, magic-wanding, or quick-masking out a shape in appropriate situations.

The reflections on the glass are made with a gradient fill on its own separate layer, tweaked a bit, then using Edit > Transform > Warp to make it conform to the outlines of the glass, then CMD-clicking the glass outline's layer (there we go again, see?) to trim the gradent. Blending down using Screen and adjusting the opacity made it look like it was of the glass. A radial gradent fill overlay layer effect (which allowed me to pull the bright area down at will) provided the lovely golden color of the beer, and a brush with a specially-designed bubble and certain tweaks in the Brushes pallette provided the realistic-looking columns of bubbles. Altogether, pretty nifty.

Thristy? Draw yourself a glass of beer!

Tags: photoshop, photoshop tutorials, brushes, layer effects, photoshop cs3

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The Photoshop Apple

1811.

(tutoral via PSDTUTS) One of my favorite pastimes is finding Photoshop tutorials to do. With paying design work currently very few and far between, skills can atrophy if not maintained, and there are enough tutorials on the intermets that an aspiring employed designer and illustrator can have what amounts to a constant continuing education program.

With the advent of fall, we think apples ... green, red, whatever. We love apples. If you can't get to the store, though, Photoshop allows us to get a nice green apple (with a dash of fall color) pretty much any time we want.

This tutorial at PSDTUTS is what does the trick. In 21 steps of moderate difficulty, you use layers, blending, opacity, clipping masks and a lot of standard tricks just about every Photoshopper is better off knowing to create a rather realistic, shiny, green apple with a delightful blush on one side. This was how my effort turned out: nifty, which you can clicky to embiggen:

(or click here if the picture link proves intractable-goes to Photobucket) Amongst the most relied-upon skills in this tutorial is the use of CMD-Clicking (or CTRL-Clicking for Windows users) the thumbnail in the Layers palette. This loads the non-transparent area of the chosen layer as a selection, which is a quick way to control fill and effects and cöordinate work on child layers with a parent layer, which ends up working kind of like registration holes on a mylar stack ... they keep work on upper layers aligned with that on a lower layer. It's kind of an intermediate point between just selecting by eye and going the full ride and committing your selection to an alpha channel for later use. It's one of those mad useful skills I occasionally go on about.

I did this in Photoshop CS3 but it will probably work as far back as version 7, maybe even earlier. Layers, layer groups, the selection technique, layer opacity and filling selections ... these are all old PS standbys.

About the only weakness the tutorial has is that it's 99% process and 1% exploration. In other words, while you're going 'round the world with blending modes, and that's fine because blending modes really are part of the key to making your Photoshop illustration come to life, I'd like to know the why. Just like any Photoshop user, I can name at least five or six blending modes off the top of my head, but I'd love it if someone could explain it and why they do what they do ... and where it would be good to use each. I find I use Multiply quite a bit ... but just what is that doing? Blending modes for me is less of a thinking thing and more of a trial-and-error thing.

But enough of the complaining. If that's a flaw, it's a small one; this tutorial is very good ... just like that apple'd taste, I'm sure.

Go ahead. Have yourself an apple!

Tags: Photoshop, photoshoppery, Photoshop tutorials

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