Earlier this year I posted a showcase of 80s inspired neon art featuring all kinds of bright fluoro colours and retro futuristic scenes. Having enjoyed browsing this style of art and listening to albums of 80s style electro synth music I decided to have a go at creating a design of my own. Follow this step by step tutorial to see how I put together the Electric Overdrive artwork with various texturing and lighting effects in Photoshop.
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The design we’ll be creating makes use of all the typical elements of 80s style retro futuristic art. Desert mountain ranges, Tron style grids and galactic star fields are all combined with intense RGB colours.
We’ll take the first few steps in Adobe Illustrator to create a grid which we can then copy over to Photoshop. Draw a line on the artboard and drag out a duplicate by holding the Alt key. Repeatedly press CMD+D to repeat this transformation, then copy/paste the lines and rotate them by 90° to create a grid layout.
Hi Chris and all,
Fab tutorial but I’m a bit stuck. When I paste the grid and try to transform it the perspective option is greyed out when I right click? (I inserted it as a smart object, is this where I went wrong?)
Can anyone help please?
Thanks,
Laura
Awesome artwork and fresh tutorial design concept. Loved it.
Hey Chris!
Hey Chris! Sharing this today on our Arsenal Facebook!
Great tutorial, thanks. I’m looking to design a site with a heavy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City vibe, and this will be really helpful for the logo.
OMG! He’s the witcher!
I love this tutorial, so well written and the result is AWESOME
thank you! *-*
Trying to create a similar effect but I don’t have Illustrator. Do you have to have Illustrator for the first step? I have PS. Is there a free alternative to Illustrator?
This is awesome.
I haven’t read all of this just yet, but the colors that are used are – amazing – they really caught my eye.
I’m pretty sure had a lot of cassette tapes with this type of cover on them, lol
Well, that looks really nice!
Love your blog <3
This is great, such a fun design.
That hot pink Mistral script reminds me of a certain movie!
Another knockout tutorial, Chris.
That’s a wicked tutorial.
And uses so many PS tools so effectively.
Nice one Chris!
This is awesome and such a fun tutorial! Very nice one Chris, beautiful and attractive effects you put in this tutorial :)
That is awesome, love the colors! Thanks for the tutorial!
Epic tutorial Chris ty.
Wow! Thank you for such in-depth tutorial – it is really easy to repeat now, even for starting designers, plus it gives some great ideas even for prefessionals
I admire the way of art and the design
I loved your blog. I will tell all my friends on twitter. The color is super
Thanks dude! Its very cool! Illustrator & Ps is just the coolest ever!!
Waah this electric landscape is just amazing, really great final resultat and a Photoshop tutorial very usefull. Thank you Chris.
Singing…..”In the 80’s….the 80’s”….
Good stuff, thanks for sharing Chris!
Very nice. I have used similar techniques before, however the addition of the lightning bolt stock image really kicked it up a notch :)
Cool, very good imitation of the Farcry 3 Blood Dragon cover art
You should def mention that it’s an imitation of the Farcry 3 Blood Dragon cover… unless they copied your tutorial. In which case, fantastic job. :)