Feel free to use these in any project commercial or otherwise. Leave me a comment if you do use it please.

udc_xray_freebies

This is a quick tutorial on how I created the stencil effect for the poster.

Quick Steps

• Select background (expand and smooth your selection).
• Fill with white.
• Black and white (not an adjustment layer) your photo and up the contrast.
• Merge the photo w/ the background.
• Make your photo a smart object.
• Apply Gaussian Blur and Cutout(In that order).
• Tweak both filters (every photo is different).
• Live Trace it in illustrator to and color each shape.
• Expand and Tweak the trace.

Detailed Steps
Select background (smooth the edges out)
Using your favorite selection tool to select the background of your image. Smooth out your selection by going to Select>Refine Edge and use the smooth slider to smooth out your edges.

It also helps to contract your selection a bit this creates a darkened border around your subject.

Fill with White
Fill your Selection with white.

Black and white (not an adjustment layer) your photo and up the contrast
You have to use the Image>Adjustment menu for this step because you want the filters applied in later steps to affect the edited version of the image and not the original. Not the best practice to completely destroy your image but a necessary one.

Merge the photo w/ the background
Fairly self-explanatory when you apply the filters to the image you want to make the entire image reside on one layer.

Make your photo a smart object
Go to Filters>Convert for Smart Filters to make your image a smart object this will let you adjust filters to get the best image later.

Apply Gaussian Blur and Cutout(In that order)
I used about 4px Gaussian blur. For the cutout I used 3 levels with 0 edge simplicity and 3 edge fidelity. If your image doesn’t have enough detail and is muddy, try taking down Gaussian blur. If your image has to much detail for you take the blur for edge simplicity up.

Tweak both filters (every photo is different)
If your image doesn’t have enough detail and is muddy, try taking down Gaussian blur. If your image has to much detail for you take the blur for edge simplicity up.

Live Trace it in illustrator to and color each shape.
Open your image in Illustrator and release the crop area and delete it. Also get rid of any clipping masks ect. Then go to Object>Live Trace>Tracing options. You can use my settings below or find your own.

Expand and Tweak
Live Trace is hardly ever perfect, by expanding your trace you can tweak individual paths. Go to Object>Expand and then click OK. Now you have all the individual paths for your tweaking pleasure.

So digging into my old supplies from drawing for and some sketchbook paper yielded quite an awesome array of brushes. You can look at the example above for a practical example or at the screen caps below for some samples.

Thumbnail Preview

Ink/Watercolor Stroke Preview

Pencil Stoke Prevew.

Usage Tips

These are all sized to be used at 300dpi if you are designing at 150 or 72 for the web just make sure you make the sizes smaller.

I will be releasing the raw tip shapes sometime later this week so you can add your own options and create your own brushes.

Most of these are pressure sensitive and work really great with a Wacom tablet. If you dont have a tablet make sure you change the options.

Download

Feel free to use these for commercial and personal project. If you can try to give me a link back somewhere so other people can find these and use them to.

22 Artistic Brushes.zip

One of the project I recently finished up was the poster for the Civil War Lan. This poster had originally been designed as a spin-off of the emu lan 3.0 poster. However the design ended up not working out so well. Lee asked me to look into doing a kind of “capture the flag” themed poster.

Someone had been looking into the capture the flag theme to and found an awesome Unreal Tournament fansite kit with some nice hi-res character photos. After several hours of painting some grungy watercolor flag and slapping the character and some text over it I came up with this.

1st Draft

2nd Draft

At this point the general design was working out well and the flags were looking betting the more I added to them but the whole poster felt stale with the grungy battle scared flags and then the clean computer render and text so I began looking up some ways to add to the design.

3rd Draft Smoke Added

4th Draft Smoke and Bars Added

At this point the rest of the office started to chime in on the poster. Everyone liked where it was going until made the point that the character was a copyrighted image and this would be going out to Corvallis for the OSU part of the event so the character had to be scraped. The poles also needed more grunge as Paul also pointed out to match the same battle scarred appearance of the flags.

5th Draft No Character

With out the character to anchor the whole design it started to unravel a bit as I messed around with the proportions and text placement.

6th Draft Different Text Placement

The text placement in this version is close to where it ends up in the final poster. But the proportion and size of the flags still isn’t working out.

7th Draft Smoke Flags Changed

8th Draft Flags and Text Different

This draft also includes the flags attaching to the poles differently (as you can see in the drawings at the top) and moving Civil War Lan back to the bottom to try and anchor the flags.

9th Draft Bars Reappear Some stuff is removed to redo

Trying to add some weight to the poster mean I bring back the black bars from the start. I’m also reworking how the flags attach to the poles after overdoing it the first time around.

But the design still isn’t working so Lee asks me to look at stock robots we could use. What I come up with enthuses no one.

10th Draft Version A Stock Character

10th Draft Version B

Neither of these robots work at this point Paul wanted this to work as much as I do and offers to do a character illustration for me to drop in.

11th Draft Pauls Character

This looks promising but the coloring doesn’t work out on the character and then Lee comes to the rescue with the computer graveyard idea that ends up on the final poster. An hour or so of searching IStock gives me the this mock-up.

12th Draft Stock Photomockup

This gives me a good feeling and Lee agrees so net is the first mockup with the stock photos edited and placed.

13th Draft Hi-Res Stock Added

This is what the final poster ended up being. I just went in and added the smoke back in.

14th Draft Final Image

And there it is in all its glory. Notice the misspelling of “Oregon State University” which someone catches right before we go to press and which remained misspelled throughout 14 drafts and almost 30 print outs.

The final file wieghs in at several hundered megabytes over 50 layers and half a dozen smart objects each containing an additional 10 layers. The 32×57.5 version that will be outside the Fish Bowl soon weights in at almost a gig.

Step 1 : Offset the image to be patterned by half the width and height of the image.

Step 2: The border parts of the pattern will now tile properly and the edges of the image are now in the center. So go in with the patch and clone stamp tools to clean the image up to make a perfect tiling image.

Detailed Explanation

Create an image to start out with. In using a 3000x3000 square.

To start with I made a 3000×3000 image you can use whatever size you want but it should divide evenly in half. To make these I used these artistic brushes from Alex Dukal.

Open up the offset filter.

Open up the offset filter from the “Other” part of the filter menu.

Enter half your documents width and height for the Horizontal and Vertical offset.

Use image size to find half your images width and height to enter for the values in vertical and horizontal offset.

After the offset filter has been applied

You can now see that what was the four corners of the image are not aligned across the center and the edges will now tile perfectly.

Zoom into one of the edges and use the patch toll to remove it.

Next grab the patch tool and select and area close to the edge where a line is visbile try to taper the shape so that you select as few pixels along the edge as possible. Also select a wide area around the edge so that the patch tool has something extra to blend.

Drag the patch to cover the edge with a new area and erase the hard edge.

After you have a good selection drag the patch tool to cover the edge with a new area. Once you release the mouse the edge should look like the the image below.

Image after the patch tool.

Now you can see that the patch tool has fixed the hard edge by blending pixels from the area you specify with the pixels from the destination area. You can also use the clone tool to make adjustments and clear out the hard edges. Once you get the hard edges its time to test the image.

Now define a a pattern from the edit menu.

Now that you have fixed all the hard edges with the patch or clone tool Select All and go to Edit > Define Pattern, name your pattern and hit ok.

Now make a new pattern layer from the bottom of the layer palate.

Once you make a new pattern layer just set the scale down a little and check your edges and then go back and fix problem areas and check again. You can Add to your pattern just as long as nothing gets cut off by an edge.

Just set the scale down and check your edges.

That was it now to have a simple pattern layer that you can use for web or print and a quick technique to make more.

Final Pattern made with the offset filter.

Easy Seamless pattern. HOORAY!

Another interesting tidbit for mac users (like me) is that Apple sets the default gamma of their monitors to be 1.8 instead of 2.2 like most PC so out monitors have slightly less saturation and contrast then most PC monitors would the fix is to calibrate our monitor in the system preferences. Apple has directions on that here.

After completing those 2 steps I noticed a distinct difference in my images and corrected the colors with some hue/sat and levels. Then tested in firefox and fixed everything up. The thumbnail image is my best guess at a before/after look at what exactly was going on.

Includes 15 Hi-Res Spray Paint Brushes

Includes 9 Hi-Res Ink Splats