Videos
In today’s Illustrator and Photoshop video tutorial I’ll take you through the design process for creating a vintage postcard design, based on the postcard design style known as “large letter”, which was popular throughout the mid-20th century. Often accompanied by the words “Greetings from…”, these postcards presented the name of a place with faux 3D type effects and featured a variety of pictures of that locale clipped within the text face of each letter. We’ll use the tools available in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to replicate the visual traits of those original souvenirs.
In today’s Photoshop tutorial I’m going to show you an effective trick to create a fake shallow depth-of-field, blurred background effect, which helps give your photos that beautiful large aperture look that draws your attention to the subject while everything else is out of focus. To achieve the effect for real you would shoot with a fast lens with a low F-stop, but you can fake the appearance, or enhance the existing depth of field in a photo using some simple Photoshop tools.
I’ve enjoyed processing some photos of my car lately, using various editing and compositing techniques to enhance the flat and boring images that come out of the camera into vibrant automotive portraits. Today I’ll show you the process I went through to transform a rear-end shot of my Mustang in a rather uninspiring location of the local supermarket car park, into a much improved version with a dramatic backdrop, punchy colours and atmospheric lighting effects.
In today’s Illustrator tutorial we’ll be making a group of cute, but extremely dangerous Ninja characters in Adobe Illustrator, using basic shapes and flat colours to give the artwork a stylised illustrative look. This is an ideal topic for beginners, since we’ll be using a range of basic Illustrator tools and techniques.
In today’s video tutorial we’re going to look at creating a photo effect inspired by the loading screens and cover artwork of the Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA) game, which feature a life-like illustration style of the characters but with a clear digitally painted appearance. Due to the nature and theme of the game, the effect works best when combined with pictures of gangsters, fast cars and scantily dressed ladies against the city streets. While the originals were likely painted from scratch, we’ll use stock photos as the source of the effect, which will then be transformed with the help of a cocktail of Photoshop filters.
2019 is just around the corner, so it’s that time of year when I look back at the last 12 months of uploads to my Spoon Graphics YouTube Channel and share my top 10 most popular video tutorials from 2018. Channel stats on the whole are down slightly from last year, by between 15-30% in Views and Subscriber growth. This time last year I’d just about reached 200,000 subscribers, and almost a year on I’m almost at 250,000. It’s not quite the explosion from 100,000-200,000 in 2017, but it’s nice to know my channel is still steadily growing. Here’s an overview of my best performing uploads. Which ones were your favourite?
