I spent some time the other day experimenting with colorizing a black and white photograph. The image I worked on is a photo of my Grandad during WW2. The original has that washed out sepia look to it, as you would expect from a snapshot from the 1940s. But after scanning and processing it in Photoshop, it’s brought to life in full colour and much better contrast, which really helps you imagine the scene for real.
This week I posted a showcase of Day of the Dead inspired designs and artworks, which gave me the inspiration to experiment with a sugar skull illustration of my own. In real life, these are little sweet treats that are decorated with various floral patterns and shapes, but they’ve also become a popular subject for vector designers. In today’s tutorial I’ll take you through the process of creating your own vector sugar skull illustration in Adobe Illustrator. It will be entirely created out of basic shapes, which are customised and layered up to produce intricate embellishments.
In today’s Adobe Photoshop tutorial I’ll show you how to create a great looking retro text effect. It’s made using a mix of layer styles and some clever Photoshop techniques, but the best part is it also makes use of Smart Objects to non-destructively create the effect, meaning the original type element can still be updated to change the wording.
In today’s Adobe Illustrator tutorial we’re going to reproduce the 80s inspired 3D chrome text effect from the title logo of the recent movie trailer for Thor: Ragnarok. We’ll use Illustrator’s simple 3D tool to give the text that three dimensional appearance, then create the shiny chrome look with a series of gradient fills.
In today’s Adobe Illustrator tutorial we’re going to combine simple shapes with colourful gradients to create a fun cartoon style monster face. We’ll just concentrate on creating the main facial features which emerge from the background in this tutorial, but you can use the same techniques to illustrate almost anything. Keeping things simple not only helps make this tutorial good for beginners to get to grips with creating vector artwork in Illustrator, but this simplistic and stylised effect lends itself well to cool avatar graphics, product skins, or even stickers if you were to crop the artwork into a circle.
Today’s we’re going to have loads of fun creating an abstract—and quite surreal—collage style piece of artwork in Adobe Photoshop. This kind of art style has been popular for years, although originally it would have been made using traditional photomontage techniques with photographs, magazine images and newspaper clippings, all cut apart and reassembled using scissors, glue and photocopiers. These days we can use digital techniques to make things without even getting our hands dirty! Plus there’s a wealth of source material readily available in the form of stock imagery that we can pick and choose from. If you browse Google or Pinterest for some examples of surreal collages, you’ll see there’s literally no limits to what you can produce. I personally love the ones with comical outcomes that are made with completely random combinations. For this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll use a selection of free stock images along with basic Photoshop compositing techniques to create a fun abstract piece of artwork. Traditional artists sometimes used paint or pastels to add colour to their work, so we’ll do the same with pixels. Then to mimic the analogue reproduction methods originally used, we’ll distress the result with some effects that mimic bad photocopy prints with high noise and harsh contrast.