The Concept

I first saw a graphic piece on Flickr one day and it basically had a heart with a bunch of words filling it.  From there I got inspired to do my own version by using the name of that special person and then making a heart from the words that describe her or my feelings about her.  Along with just the typography, I’d also put images that describes her personality and finally capture it as what I see in my heart.

Step 1 – Making the Background

The background simply consists a gradient using a yellow-light blue-dark blue color scheme.  As you can see, I made the center to be light to give hint that the center will be the main focus of the piece.  I found a stock of a sky that filled the vertical area well and set that to soft light while masking a few parts that I didn’t like (mainly the edges of the piece since I wanted to have some parts faded out and other parts more prominent).

Step 2 – Main Content

Here I began creating the main focus of the piece which is the typography part.  In terms of design difficulty, all I had to do was make a heart shape and adding a gradient and stroke to it, and then I began filling in adjectives and adverbs.

The hardest part of this was actually coming up with the words that I felt, as well as wording and placing them in a way that the words would fit inside the heart shape.  In addition to just having text, I experimented with different opacities to make some words more prominent and kind of give the eye a tease of jumping back and forth between what words pop out.

Step 3 – Decorating your main focus

In this step, I simply added embellishments by finding stocks of flowers, and leaves to surround the heart to give it background of some sort.  By simply masking parts I don’t need and rearranging layers, I can make the heart look like it’s been enraptured in the foliage.

Step 4 – More Decoration

I brought in more stocks in particularly a lion, parrot, and a lime to give the piece more color, and different depths of photomanipulation.  Again, I masked out parts that shouldn’t be shown, and in addition, I found that using the old “Duplicating the layer and giving it a blur and setting it to soft light/hard light” to be quite useful in making the pictures more vivid.

Other than that adjustment, all the pictures so far are on normal blending mode since I didn’t want the stocks to blend with the blue background.

Step 5 – Starting to Add Details

I begin to add details by adding some splatters, and some inkblots stocks that I’ve had.  I wanted to add more depth into the piece and so one way to do that is to simply give objects in the scene a shadow to show that there is a distinction between that object the background.

You can use either the “Drop Shadow” option within the Blending Options of the layer OR what I do is add my own shadows by making a new layer behind the object that I want to add a shadow to and brush behind the objects with a “Soft Round Brush” with black and played around with the opacity of the layer and erased any unnecessary bits that didn’t flow with the piece.

Step 6 – Adding more depth and decorations

Now I began to add more to the piece by adding a polaroid background behind the heart and more splatters.  I introduced some more text on the bottom of the polaroid by choosing a font and setting the opacity down.  The splatters were simple to integrate as they were on white background and so I set the blending mode of them to multiply to show the splatter, and the white background is simply gone.

Step 7 – Faded lines

A technique (if you want to call it that) that I started to use was making lines and bars of different colors and masking them with textured brushes to give a faded out look.  It works well in abstract and grungy pieces and doesn’t make the piece harsh by having the masked parts.

As you can see below, all you need to do to make these type of lines is to have shape/layer of anything, and give it a layer mask and use a textured brush to mask some parts of it away.

Step 8 – Adjustment Layers and Scanlines

As we get closer to the end, I decided that the piece needed some adjustment layers to bring up the colors and make the color brighter.  I added a Curves layer, and some Gradient Maps and set them to soft light.

In addition, I added scanlines to give the background some texture.  Scanlines are simply just patterns and I filled the background with it.  Below is a step by step process of how to create scanlines fast.

Step 9 – Colorful Light Flares

To top the piece off, I added some “Light Flares” to the piece to give lighting and more color.  You’ll find these among a lot of graphic pieces since they are quite popular and they do add more to the piece in terms of effects.

By simply making a new layer and using soft brushes of different colors, set the layer to screen or linear dodge, and notice how they add more color and lighting to a piece.

Conclusion – Final Result

Of course your piece may or may not look like this, but that’s not the point.  The main point is to show the simple process of making a graphic like this and showing some techniques that are used in them.  I hope you enjoy the tutorial, and subscribe and keep updated with Creative-Le Studios for more.

In today’s pack, we have a 3D Female Head Model made in 3D Studio Max created by Aaron Forney.

Like before, the download contains an OBJ and MTL file ready for texturing or for anything you can think of that doesn’t include breaking the terms found in the readme.txt file inside. Thank you for your downloads and support and check back again for another Wednesday Resource.

Download Contents

Zip file includes – .OBJ, .MTL, .PNG, Read Me File
Download Link – Download Here

If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for future Resource Wednesdays’, feel free to comment below.

Skill level: Beginner to Intermediate
Programs: Autodesk Mudbox

Step 1

I have my model sculpted and I am now ready to import the character’s outfit.

Step 2

Go to File > Import. Mudbox will give you a browsing option; find the mesh that you want to import. I use the file extension .OBJ for my meshes.

Step 3

The outfit file is now imported into Mudbox, and ready for sculpting. One very important tip is to always make sure your meshes are centered at the origin (0,0,0) before you export them from your modeling package.

When your model is at the origin it will always import into Mudbox centered, making things a lot easier to work with.

Step 4

And now on the side you will be able to see that you are now able to select the outfit mesh on your model in Mudbox.

In closing, remember that when exporting a mesh for sculpting always make sure that it is centered to the origin. Good luck and happy sculpting!

About the Author

Aaron Forney is a 3D Modeler in Tempe, Arizona who is taking his free time to dedicate tutorials and resources for Creative-Le Studios. Working temporarily as a freelancer, his main goal is to work in the game industry as a 3D Modeler specializing in Character Modeling.

Sometimes you have to let go of things in order free time to do other things.  Sometimes you have to readjust who you are in order to realize what you can do/capable of.  And to put it bluntly, sometimes you need to sit down and say to yourself, “Who am I?”.

The main problem that I’ve been dealing with was figuring out what to do with my blogs/websites/online homes.  One side of me wants to do a graphics blog with tutorials, resources, and so forth.  The other part of me wants to do something personal.  I have this studio that I’m starting to bring to the surface, and I have a lot of projects that I want to do to be a part of my network community (so to speak).

After reading an article by David Bushell about his reason for “blogging”, it finally hit me on what I really wanted to do.  I’ll be creating a new blog that will be my personal extension of myself as a designer along with having this blog to still supply tutorials, resources, inspiration, and other things towards the community.  The journal category will be lying about, since I do cherish this layout a lot, but the new blog will have a simplistic look on it, as I want the content to be the main attraction.  In addition, http://creative-le.com will turn more into my company’s website as times goes by.

I’ll be giving you a heads up on the new blog and domain when it comes, and just giving you a notice that I’m not dead or forgotten about the blog posts on this site.  I’ve been going through a lot of headaches figuring out what to do.  You’ll see some interesting updates in the next few weeks, and I’ll definitely blog about them.

-Dan

Happy July 4th to you guys. I’m rather late, but for the past 2 days I’ve been working on catching up from my mishap last blog post, and I can finally say that I’m caught up to where I was. Which is a plus and negative since I definitely wanted to be farther than that, however I did do other things that didn’t include watching fireworks or celebrating the independence of America with other people.

Let’s recap my weekend and make a new list for myself for this week.

Recap of the Weekend + More

1. As I mentioned, I redid my CSS styling for the wordpress theme that I’m currently working on with Vtension. And now I’m left to do the comments, the archives loop page, and making the portfolio function, as well as contact pages and forms, and finally theme options for it. And THEN I have to fill the content up so that it looks nice as a demo. So close, yet so far. This will my top priority.

2. Worked on a friend’s site for his business. As much as I wanted to push this to the side, for some reason I did most of the work that needed to be done for it this weekend. I basically took an old looking site with super awesome TABLES and great ASPX technology, and wrapped it in some plain divs and css and it magically put itself together. And I also put up his site for his other section of business that will hopefully do well. In the end, I worked a lot more on it than I expected and got a lot more done than I expected and so this was a plus for my weekend.

3. I watched all the episodes that are currently subbed for Schemes of Beauty. Those of you that know about dramas especially asian ones, can know that it’s almost a task just to keep updated, or catch up, or watch these dramas. However, I guess I’m glad I had some insomniac as of late since I’ve been watching these episodes pretty late at night. Then again, once I watch one clip, I just can’t stop until my eyes just quit for the day. Schemes of Beauty is a really good drama and I’m glad Vina recommended it to me. Now I’m kind of anxious because, now I have to wait for the other episodes to be subbed and who knows how long that will take.

As a result, I’m looking for another show to watch, so korean, chinese, japanese…whatever recommendations you may have, feel free to give me some.

4. I got a piano! But I haven’t used it fully yet. I need to organize my room for space, but the midi to USB converter I bought works well with my Mac and Synthesia, so when I get the chance I hope I can entrance myself into the world of music. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the time and motivation to do it. But I think with the way my life is going now, I have good motivation to practice. (Can’t say that I have time, but I do have the strive). I’d like to thank my teacher for lending the piano for me. It saves me money, plus it’ll probably give me a good feel of using a piano again after having not touching one since highschool. (although I was bad back then too)

5. Getting rid of more stuff. My 2nd monitor is up for a prize tonight, and so is my iPod Touch, but my friend helped me on that by giving away his old iPhone 3GS to me and so I no longer needed an iPod Touch. More and more I want to live life to its minimal state, but it’s getting harder as time goes by. I definitely need to go through my garage and make a garbage corner since I’m desperately looking for a place to live now and don’t want to own so many things.

6. It feels like I did more, but probably didn’t. In all, I had a work-filled holiday. I’ll get to posting some things this week. I owe you guys a tutorial, and I think I might do a list of links since I recently compiled a list for someone that wanted some inspiration and sites to look at.