Tutorials
I’ve been wanting to have some fun with the low-fi poster style that’s usually associated with punk rock gigs and revolution propaganda, but I couldn’t decide what to base my fictional design on. Then I saw the trailer for the new Rogue One movie and I knew I had to produce a Star Wars themed design for this tutorial! Follow along to see how to create a grungy propaganda poster for the Rebel Alliance in Adobe Photoshop with dirty textures, spray paint effects and a low-cost, hand made feel.
Today’s video tutorial is all about Cinemagraphs, which are cool animated GIFs where the motion is restricted to a specific area of the image. You can make Cinemagraphs from any video footage as long as there’s a combination of stationary objects and looping elements. Ideally it will have been filmed using a tripod to eliminate shaking or moving too. Clips of escalators, subway trains, or some kind of repetitive human action all produce great results, especially if there’s other areas of the shot that can be frozen to enhance the effect.
My most popular Photoshop video tutorial on the Spoon Graphics YouTube channel is my guide to creating the trendy Double Exposure effect, where two photographs are blended into one image to create a surreal picture. I’ve since noticed that a new style of double exposure photography is becoming pretty popular, where two different coloured images are overlaid to create Double Color Exposure effect. Follow along with this tutorial as I show you how to create this effect using two model poses with the Channels in Photoshop.
The kinds of tutorials I love creating are those that produce a really cool result from quite a simple tool or technique. The artwork I’ll be showing you how to create today fits right into that category. It makes use of Photoshop’s Liquify tool, along with a few additional edits to create the kind of trendy artwork that’s popular on album covers or as abstract backgrounds that could form part of a brand. One of the fun things about this process is you can achieve a different result every time, either by using an alternative base image, or even by just using the Liquify brushes randomly.
One of the classic Photoshop tutorial topics is the creation of a pencil drawing effect from a photograph. It’s one of those quick and simple techniques that produces a satisfying result, which makes the tutorial great for beginners. Throughout its history, Photoshop has featured lots of built-in filters that produce various sketch and artistic effects, but they don’t exactly produce a realistic outcome. In this tutorial I’ll show some clever steps that will transform a photograph into a hand drawn pencil sketch, which can even be fine tuned to find the most authentic look.
Today’s Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop video tutorial is based on the metal text effect from the title artwork for the movie Fantastic Beasts. It’s a really nice shiny metal, almost chrome like effect with a mix of water droplets, lens flares and some really cool custom type that adds sharp scales to depict the scary fantasy beasts the movie is based around. I’ll show you how I made my concept artwork for Saint George and The Dragon in a similar style, from the type customization in Illustrator through to the creation of the metal effect using Photoshop layer styles.
