Simple Grafix

Here are some good looking brushes to add to your arsenal. These are a mix of fantasy, splatter, vector and other brushes I found that would look great added to your projects. Give them a try, let me know what you think.

Continue reading “20 Free Photoshop Brushes” »

Butterfly Brush Set:

A special and brand new Butterfly set of 8 brushes. This is one of those sets that everyone has a different use for. I put these together with modified brush settings, I was looking for some good effects and not the typical single wing or outline of the butterfly.

Here’s a preview:

Here are the settings I used to get the effects:

DOWNLOAD Enjoy these they are useful in all kinds of different ways, with just endless possibilities.

Here are some great (Learning Rights Only) .psd Signatures from =VanisH=

.psd pack 1: Click Image

.psd pack 2:

When creating signatures a lot of people will spend hours adding layer after layer to come up with a great piece only to slap some text on in 2 minutes or less. Most the time the text or font selected brings the art down or distracts from the signature and in most cases…well it looks like they only spent a couple of minutes adding their text in. This tutorial, article, post is more of an attempt to raise your awareness and to help you out with finding good fonts to have in your arsenal before starting a project and getting all the way to the end just to dump some text just to finish.

Continue reading “Fonts! Fonts and more Fonts!” »

Right well today you will learn how to create this sig:

First of all you will need to open up a new canvas with these dimensions, 454 px wide and 120 px high. Fill in the main background with black to get something like this:

Next, create a new layer and get out some of your faveorite abstract brushes. Now brush one or two of these on varying layers till you are satisfied with your brushing. Hopefully you might just have something resembling this:

Now with all that done now would be the perfect opportunity to put in our text. The text I will be using is called Living Hell and you can download it for free at http://1001fonts.com
Now type in the text you want in all capital letters to get a neat effect but make sure you make the first letter of each word bigger then the rest of that word. If you got it right you can free-transform it to get it to go with the flow of your sig like this:

( I put my text layer benath some of the brush layers so as to give it a neat effect later on in the sig)

Now for actual render bit, the mainpoece of the sig. Get a decent enough quality render which you can get some from loads of different sites around the internet but a good one would be [url]http://planetrenders.net[/url] or alternativly you can use the same one as me which would be this one:

Now put the render into whatever part of the sig you want. I put mine roughly in the middle of the sig as you can see here:

Now create a new layer for this next step. Make sure it is ontop of all other layers and then go to Image -> Apply image and press the ok button. Set this layer to Lighen and the go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 4.0 to get a neat little effect ^__^
You should have something similar to this:

Now get out a soft eraser brush and set the strenght of the brush to about 30-40% and lighly erase over parts of the layer but maily focus of the render portion. Erase once or twice to get a nice depth effect in your sig. Progress so far:

(As you can see from my sig, I mainy focused over the lens part of the render and hardly erased any other part. That is what you should be doing to pull of a depth effect.)

Now here comes the good part, the Gradient Map. Select your top layer and go to Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Gradient Map and use these settings:

- Soft Light – 100%

(If the colours of the fradient map clash with the render of your sig, then I would advise on choosing colours that would compliment your render and fit in well with your sig.)

If all is going to plan it should look like this:

Now we shall add a small bit of light to make it a bit brighter.
Create a new layer and get out a soft white brush aroung 150-200px and lighly brush at the edges where it seems a little too dark. Don’t go to heavy on the brsuhing as you will make it over exposed. Set this layer to Overlay at 100%. You might have something similar to mine:

Now finally we are at the last step. We are going to give a little border to the sig to make it seemed refined, and the good thing about this step is that it extremly easy to do so.
Creat a new layer and set your foreground color to black. Get our your rectangular selection tool and select the whole layer. Now go to Edit -> Stroke and use these settings:

Width – 1px
Location – Inside

And press okay to get your little border.

Viola we are finished and you should of gotten the over all effect of this:

If you enjoyed this tutorial don’t forget to give me some +rep for this ^__^

Elisha Cuthbert Signature

by 3hmoob

Here is the signature we will be making today:

First open a new canvas and place in your Render/Stock

Now, with your Gradient Tool Choose a color with White and a color from your Render/Stock Image.

After this, Smudge the your focal a bit. Use a slight scatter effect and work from your renders edges out. If you smudge too much add another render on top.

Shoot for something like this…or what looks good to you.

Select a C4D and place it behind the render/stock and set the blending of that layer to overlay. Reduce the opacity if needed:

Next we’ll add a line C4D render like this:

Set the blending to Multiply and erase the unwanted parts

Select another C4D, set the blending mode to screen and reduce opacity if needed. Erase any un-wanted parts.

Try and position this C4D on her left shoulder to give a nice effect and helps with the blending.

Add another to her Right shoulder, set blending to screen.

Add in a Gradient Map:

Set it to Lighten and drop the opacity to 50%

Add in more C4D’s near the shoulders, set the blending on the C4D’s you add to Difference.

Don’t worry that it looks bad now, we will fix it up!

Add a violet to orange Gradient Map:

Set this to screen and 40% opacity.

Using a soft brush, select a color from your render/stock and lightly brush in areas that need some highlighting. I selected the areas off her shoulders and the C4D’s in the background. Set this layer to Soft Light.

Add another Gradient map:

Set the Gradient Map to Saturation and drop the opacity to 40%.

If you feel you need to add more highlighting then select a color and lightly brush the area to enhance it a bit and bring it out. I left mine as is and didn’t feel it needed more.

Next add another gradient map: This is to turn the image to grayscale.

Leave the blending as is: Normal, 100%

Anywhere that you want to bring the color out erase, I chose just the lips and ear ring.

Time to add your Text and a border and you’re finished!

Here’s my final:

Thanks for reading and using my tutorial, be sure to visit our Forums for more tutorials and Photoshop help.

I was looking around for inspiration on a space project: Spacescapes, Terraspace, planets, stars, star fields, and sci-fi scenes. I ended spending more time viewing the works of some really talented artists and still

haven’t started the project. I was so amazed at what I was viewing I lost track of time! It must have been a wormhole or some other time displacement, I should’ve thought something was strange as I started this research the books on my desk were floating.

It is really amazing what these artists can do and it has inspired me to dust off some of the old programs such as Cinema4d, 3dsMax and start reading those tutorials.

Continue reading “Digital Art Review: Sci-Fi Space Art” »

Spidey Tutorial

Tag & tutorial by

~Rain~

Today we will be making this sig:

Continue reading “Photoshop: Spidey Tutorial” »

Elements Signature Tutorial

Tag and Tutorial By:

~Rain~

Today we will be doing a simple photo manipulation using the following:

1. Displacement maps
2. Adjustment layers
3. Sharpen and blur tools
4. Default brushing

Things you will need:

1. One Stock or wallpaper of choice
2. One psd file

Step 1:

Open a new document and choose the size of your sig, mine is 363×147 pixels. Fill with any color.

Step 2:

Drag in your stock or wallpaper and resize to your liking.

Step 3:

I wanted to darken it up and give it some contrast so I duplicated my stock

Go to Layer>Duplicate layer. Set it to Overlay, leave it at 100%

Result:

Step 4:

Next add an adjustment layer, click on the adjustment layer icon at the bottom of yous layers

Select Photo Filter. I used the settings below then set the layer to overlay, 20 % opacity.

Result:

Okay, now we are going to doa couple displacement maps so you will need a psd file with good flow that will compliment your sig. I usually just use an old sig psd.

Note: Don’t have any good psd’s? You can find some nice psd packs in the Member Resources Section at SimpleGFX

Step 5:

Make a new layer, go to Image>Apply Image>click OK

Then go to Filter>Distort>Displace

· You can play around with the settings for different effects. Also, try different psd’s as well.

Result:

Set the layer to Lighten at 100% opacity then grab your eraser tool. Using a default soft round brush erase over your focal and places that don’t look good.

My brush settings:

Result:

Step 6:

Make a new layer and go to Image>Apply Image>click OK.

Then go to Filter>Distort>Displace

I used the same settings as in Step 5. Again, play around with the settings and psd’s for different results.

Set the layer to Lighten, 100% and again grab your eraser tool and erase over your focal and anything that doesn’t look good to you.

Eraser settings:

Result:

Step 7:

The signature is was starting to look a little dark around the focal so I made a new layer and set it to overlay, 100% opacity. Then I took a 21px default soft round brush and brushed with a light orange around the focal.

Result:

Step 8:

Next I took a 100px default soft round brush and brushed lightly with black on the right side to darken it a bit.

Result:

Step 9:

Click the adjustment layer icon again and select the Gradient Map, use the settings below, then set the layer to soft light and 38% opacity.

Result:

Step 10:

Add another gradient map, set it to Color Dodge, 38% opacity

Result:

Step 11:

Make a new layer and go to Image>Apply Image>click OK. Now grab your blur tool use a default 65px default soft round brush and do some blurring on the sides and feather it in toward your focal.

Brush settings:

Result:

Step 12:

It still looks a little dark around the focal so I made a new layer and repeated Step 7.

Result:

Step 13:

Make a new layer and go to Image>Apply Image>click OK. Then grab your sharpen tool, use a default 65px soft round brush and do some sharpening on your focal. This combined with your blurring should give you some nice depth. You can use the dodge and burn tools as well, but I didn’t.

Brush settings:

Result:

Steps 14 and 15:

Add some text and a border, then your done!

Note: I didn’t need to add a light source for this sig. If you need to and you don’t know how, I explain it in my Water Aspen Tutorial

Thanks for reading

Interested in learning to create a sig/tag with depth, smudge, filters, c4d’s, flow, and clipping masks? This tutorial has all the techniques listed. After a few times thru this one you will certainly be on your way to creating some intermediate graphics.