The overprint effect is a timeless art style that was traditionally created by manually printing two colours over the same area, but it is also commonly replicated in digital art, where the Multiply blending mode in art software can simulate the subtractive colour mix. The effect is often used to create vibrant poster designs with a limited colour palette, with the overprinting effectively producing a third hue within the design. The overprint effect can also be used to create interesting art pieces that blend together two contrasting graphics of images and text. In today’s inspiration showcase I present 30 colourful designs made with overprint effects, including hand made prints using real ink as well as modern artworks that combine colours digitially.
In today’s Photoshop video tutorial we’re going to create a sweet, delicious, tasty doughnut illustration, with the help of my new Grain Shader brushes. These brushes help you bring your flat artwork to life with depth, shading and the sought-after grainy textured appearance. I’ll show you my favourite technique for easily painting in highlights and shadows, then we’ll use some Photoshop tricks to finish off the donut illustration with colourful sprinkles and a kawaii smiley face, because donuts are cute, right?!
Access All Areas members have a beautiful handwritten font to download this week, courtesy of Katsia Jazwinska. Hygge Home is a signature font with trendy flow and contrast, created by hand with a mixture of thick and thin pen strokes. It’s great for creating personal logo designs, elegant wedding stationery, or beautiful quote layouts. The font is packed with 40 ligatures that swap out certain letter pairs with much more natural looking characters to enhance the handwritten appearance.
I know my readers love a good fonts bundle, so I’m excited to share the news about the latest deal from Design Cuts. This collection of 16 professional quality, hugely versatile font families contains typefaces from some of the top font foundries for just $29 after the huge 98% discount. That’s a saving of over $1500! This bundle was made with direct feedback from the community, so it contains the best fonts designers like you and me have asked for. This means there’s a large variety of clean/corporate fonts, calligraphic/script fonts, and vintage/retro fonts to provide the perfect font for all your design projects for years to come.
Many of the Photoshop Brush packs I’ve created have just been configured as single-click brushes to stamp a texture into your artwork. Recently I’ve been experimenting with more advanced brush settings that allow the brush to be painted with, using continuous motions and varying pressure with a pen tablet. My new set of Grain Shader Brushes for Adobe Photoshop makes it easy to add shading and texturing to your illustrations. Choose from 10 brush presets with different levels of grain, then build up the texture and tone exactly where you want it within your artwork.
Follow along with today’s how-to guide to create a letterpress style poster design with overprint effects. Authentic poster art of this kind would traditionally be created by hand on a letterpress print machine, where the transfer of ink from roller to paper would naturally create the texturing and overprint appearance. Instead, we’ll be using Adobe Photoshop to mimic the style of vintage prints by using digital fonts, textures and Photoshop effects. Along the way, we’ll go over some useful techniques for creating type layouts, producing effects that realistically replicate the appearance of printed ink, and I’ll show you how layer masks can be used to apply textures that make your clean digital art look like an authentic hand-made print.
