How to create a show poster

  Jeff Treves
I'll be talking about creating a new look for a 2 person variety act based in California, a project I did. They call themselves The Tweaksters so the art needed to be tweaked. In this case, the client needed a new logo design, and incorporating that logo into an illustration to be printed and sold during and after their show. The new logo needed to be contemporary and the illustration needed to be wacky. I had received photographs and a video of their full show from the client, before I proceeded for the designs. Many thanks to .psd Photoshop magazine for giving me this chance.

Summertime

  Neil Deuerden
Summer is just around the corner so we are going to make a piece that suits, go through your playlist on your ipod and pick the cheeseyest summer tunes you own and get them playing loud to get you in the mood. It’s another tutorial that shouldn’t be beyond anyone familiar with Photoshop and gives a cool and clean result that's solid in it’s feel. So, put the coffee on and let’s begin.

Interview with illustrator Pierre-Paul Pariseau

  Ewa Samulska
Pierre-Paul Pariseau’s mixed media images have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers; on book covers, posters, cards, CDs and a children book. He has been working in advertising also. Some of his clients include: The Toronto Star, Reader’s Digest... Throughout his career he has been periodically a regular contributor to many publications. Awards include : The Society of Illustrators (N.Y.), C.A.P.I.C., RSVP competitions, Images (Best of British Illustration) and Semi-Permanent 2008 (Australia).

Interview with Russell Brown

  psd Team
Russell has been a creative force at Adobe for the past 18 years, but his influence on Photoshop’s development started right at the beginning. It was Russell’s budding relationship with Thomas and John Knoll, the program’s original developers, that helped shape the future of both Photoshop and Adobe itself. Russell

Interview with Bert Monroy

  psd Team
Bert Monroy was born and raised in New York City where he spent 20 years in the advertising industry as an art director and creative director for various agencies as well as his own. Upon discovering computers with the introduction of the Macintosh 128 in 1984, he embarked on a new digital career. He embraced the computer as an artistic medium and is considered one of the pioneers of digital art.

The real portrait

  Gao Jian
This 3D work has not certainly used the special skill, although many works have been done by 3D software, it looks like drawing. The following tutorial is mostly focused on the job flow, it doesn’t detailed the instructions for operating, hope readers can find the most suitable way for themselves to do their own artistic work. Sometime wizardly effects also can discard, impressive picture perhaps only because of one not simple idea, or one kind of simple patience.

Creating a conceptual car

  Alejandro Guzman
The development of conceptual vehicles can rest on the illustration across photographic manipulation programs to visualize the designers ideas, without they lose the visual qualities of the programs 3D. In this case we will use the Photoshop CS2 for the work of textures and car forms, defining the different materials types from the use of layers and basic tools, imitating the environmental and light properties; to finish, we will include a background developed in the program Caligari Truespace 6.6 to fuse it with the two-dimensional model.

Real or fake?

   
From the beginning of photography till the latest advances of the CS3 and the 3D, the great enigmas of humanity have been authenticated or thrown out of a window by the truthfulness of its images. UFOs, ghosts, apparitions, terrestrial and marine monsters, bizarre sensationalism and beauty are mixed in a constant to-and-through movement where the limits of reality or fantasy are not always clear.

Interview with...BILL MILLER

  Marta Kobus
Born in the world's film capital, Los Angeles, Bill took to animation early. Bill was accepted into the California Institute of Arts, Character Animation Department, where he schooled in 2D and 3D animation. Bill moved out of college into a professional career with Disney Feature Animation. Here he worked on Hercules animating the Hydra, Disney's first 3D animated character.

Portrait taking

  Emily Snape
I wanted to create an arresting image that had realistic photographic elements, highlighted and juxtaposed by a clean, bold graphic style. I used a combination of the paintbrush and airbrush tool in Photoshop with varying opacities and a section of a digital photograph to attempt to capture the essence of my friend Mike’s drive in his passion to take photographic portraits.

4 the love of it

  Gary Jay
When approaching a design job, I always kick-start my thinking from a saying I read back in my studying days: ”Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. Hence my design steps and overall execution are not over-complicated, but are easy to understand (to the Photoshop enthusiast). The basic tools I used to compose the above was a camera and Photoshop, coupled with some Freehand (vector) artwork, a bit of design know-how and my secret ingredient, love.

Caricature tutorial

  Mick Moolhuijsen
This tutorial will teach you how to draw your own caricature and what to know when you draw one. Also, I will cover some of the basics of drawing and give you some tips. First thing you need to know is what caricatures are. They're basically just drawn portraits of people, except they're exaggerated. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. In big cities all over the globe you will see various of streetartists who draw caricatures and if you've seen only a few, you'll see right away that it can vary quite a bit. It's all about exaggeration. But what? Well, keyitems. And how do you know which? Well, if you look at a photo, take a look at which parts of the face (or body) are spots that give the face it's own identity. If someone has big lips, make them bigger. If someone has a big nose, make it bigger. If someone is frowning, make the frown huge. If someone is making a weird face, make the face even weirder. The same goes for minimising thing. If someone has a small nose, make it smaller, if someone has small ears, make them smaller, etc. Also, what is done quite a lot is making the body 3-10 times smaller then usual. This focusses all the attention on the head, which is obviously the most important part of the body when it comes to identification.

Bathing Buddha

  John Buurman
The picture was entirely made with Photoshop. It’s a combination of three digital photos I made myself. The Buddha figure is a picture of one of my own sculptures. Thinking about a subject for a new tutorial I got inspired by my garden Buddha. I wanted to create a picture with a minimum of elements and a maximum effect. Just look at this picture and see what I mean. Have fun doing this picture. P.S. special thanks to Nils Hirseland for doing the German translation and my son John-Boy Buurman for being my right arm! (can’t use my own for a couple of weeks).

Fruity bass

  Sebastian Grenz
When dealing with numerous layers in a picture, overlaying and tweaking them will open new doors. You will soon notice that in Photoshop the possibilities are endless. One of the really famous ones in the layer options palette is the overlay tool. The concept of the whole Process sounds difficult but is actually very basic. Think of it as if you were using traditional media like tracing paper, acetate, pen, normal paper, and an erasure. You are then cutting out objects and placing them on top of on another. Regard it as a digital collage with more options and tools to choose from. In the end you could create anything.

Mixed Media Techniques

  Mark Mayers
To achieve an organic look within your work requires an understanding of Color Blending and Layer modes. The key to this style of working is to paint your watercolour washes by hand and scan them rather than trying to create them within Photoshop. By blending organic with digital and having a keen eye for composition and color you’ll create a definitive style that Photoshop alone cannot achieve. The purpose of this tutorial is to encourage you to create your own traditional media. Don’t worry if you’re not talented with a paintbrush – just by making some random color washes and combining them with Photoshop you’ll be taking your illustrations to new organic heights!

From sketch to computer graphics

  Aleksandra Wasiukiewicz
Realistic shading and painting characters is often a real nuisance for beginner graphics. Each graphic is looking for his own unique style and totally satisfying finall effect. Here is a simple method of coloring for those of you, who still feel more comfortable using pencil rather than graphics tablet, and who would like to give their works an interesting appearance.

Manual textures

  Alejandro Guzman
This article takes as aim the development of different textures types of agreement to the material of which this one composed each of them; the construction of the same ones is realized stepwise from the sketch base until the finished artwork, using as excuse for it the topic of human figure. The above mentioned implies that the performer must depart from an already made sketch or to construct, since in case of the exercise, one inside the same program. For the work I use the version CS2 of Photoshop and a graphical common Table

Pearl Diver

  Gary Kaplugin
Before you start working on any project you need to come up with a concept of what you want to create. This is extremely important. It is far easier to work if you plan rather than just creating an image as you go along. You need to see the completed image in your mind and often it is a good idea to basically sketch what you want to achieve on paper beforehand. For the “Pearl Diver” image, I wanted to create an image where a girl has dropped a pearl necklace over the side of a boat and has dived in after to catch it. I wanted to catch the moment of her just after she has dived into the water with the bubbles rushing upwards from behind her and her reaching out towards the necklace just before she finally grabs it. For the photo session with the model, I had her laying on the studio floor on a white background in a position that would be similar to how she would look swimming underwater. Using a white background made it easier to separate the model from it. I separated the model from the background using a combination of the pen tool for her body and channel selections to separate the finer details of her hair. I have included the separated version of the model for this tutorial to save you the time of doing it yourself.

Calibrate your display - just like professionals

  psd Team
Radius was a computer hardware firm founded by Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Boich, Matt Carter, Alain Rossman and other members of the original Mac team specializing in Macintosh equipment. Founded in May 1986, their products ranged from processor upgrade cards (Radius Accelerator) bringing Motorola 68020 processors to earlier Macintosh systems; graphics accelerators (Radius QuickColor); television tuners (RadiusTV); video capture cards (VideoVision); color calibrators (PrecisionColor); multiprocessor systems (Radius Rocket) for 3D rendering and multiple OS sessions; high-end video adapters and monitors.

QuarkXPress 7 review

   
Have you ever considered what the world of desktop publishing would be without QuarkXpress? Probably the same as a nation without a ruler! Xpress has a reputation as a long-time master of DTP. For many years it was number one in all graphic design studios and publishing and printing houses. Of course it had its share of quirks but was still considered the best option available.

Worldwide Wide Web

   
In the last few years the significance of web sites has rapidly increased. Day after day one discover different ideas, methods and techniques of creating eye-catching oneb sites.What can make your web site so outstanding? No matter what you use: sound, animation, visualisation or graphic design it has to be unique, it has to whip thousands of other competing websites. The question is: how on earth to do it?There is no one particular answer to that. You can make it in at least thousand ways!But each has to be more raving than the other...

Wax model girls in advertising

  Firedog Agency
Quite often in advertising, the photo you see is not the one that came out the camera! There is a lot of retouching involved in order to make the image attractive to the reader. The photo retoucher is like a digital make-up artist, fixing natures imperfections to sell the perfect product. For this image we have a model that is meant to look like a wax figure. Therefore a lot of the retouching is based on smoothing out the skin and creating drama. We use a lot of gaussian blurs and painting with a stylus tablet in this exercise.

Swim Merlin swim!

  Pablo Vazquez
I always liked acuatic scenes, each one involves you in unique mood and colours, but over all, I like these kind of scenes because of what it takes to representate them in 2D and also in 3D, to take each of those details and to be depicted in a drawing.

Fear of the dark

  Patrick Beaulieu
Here are the details of how my latest character named was made Fear of the Dark. I will explain you, bellow, what methods, tools and tricks of the trade I have used. I've created this final image for the strange behavior contest (www.cgtalk.com)! It's a strange creature, a mix between a crab, a worm and a deer.

Trapped

  Massimo Righi
What I would like to do is to pick of the animals the characteristics that more fascinate me. During a recent travel I have taken some photo at the Bird Park of Kuala Lumpur. Immediately I've been captured by the expression of this parrot.One strange mixture of drama, given from the animal in cage, and of fun given by the behaviour typical of these animals.

Transformers

  Alon Chou
When Transformers hit the big screen, it soon raised up the heat in theaters all over the world. I even went to see the film again particularly for this artwork, in order to get a more vivid feel of the scene, as well as searching for ideas.

Deep and moody

  Neil Deuerden
Right time to go deep into Photoshop and create an image using loads of simple effects to create an image with depth and composition. This is simpler than you think but can demand a lot from your system. You will be switching between Illustrator, Photoshop, Painter and throwing a few hand rendered elements in just for good measure so put the kettle on, sit back and get ready to begin!

The Lord of the Ducks – Carl Barks

  Yasin Mustafa Dama
Carl Barks, born in 1901 in Oregon, was one of the most important comic book artists in the world. Barks was a contemporary of Constantin Alajalov, Edward Ardizzone, Boris Artzybasheff, Walt Disney, Robert Fawcett, Al Hirschfeld, Ray Prohaska and Saul Tepper ve Sulamith Wulfin and idolized their work.

Interview with... Marek Kochout

  .psd Team
Pooh and Darkwing Duck. I was only half way through my course but decided to take the test and try out anyway. As it turned out myself and 3 others were offered jobs as Trainee Inbetweeners. It would mean having to move to Sydney, but I decided to go anyway. Six years at Disney were great and I worked myself up to Animator. In 1996, Fox Animation was starting up a Studio in Phoenix Arizona, and they were coming to Australia to look for Animators to staff their new Studio. I submitted my reel and got a job working on Anastasia as a special effect animator. After Anastasia the studio began to decline and I applied to Dreamworks in 1998. I was hired to work on The Road to Eldorado and have been here ever since. I made the jump from Traditional (Hand drawn) animation, in 2002 to work on Shrek 2 and have been a 3D animator since.

Think of the wall

  Stewart Michael Bruce
Stewart Michael Bruce merges painting and photography to create phantasmagoric images that capture the imagination. In this tutorial we will work extensively with the layer palette to create our image. Don’t be intimidated by the layer palette – basically, just drag-and-drop your photographs onto your canvas. We’ll also work extensively with the lasso and mask tools.

Audrey

  Massimo Righi
Classical movies and photographs have always inspired me. This portrait is based on an old black and white Audrey Hepburn image that immediately catch my eyes for the delicacy and simplicity of the photo itself. The image has been made with Maya 8.0 and rendered with Mental Ray. I've painted the textures in Photoshop but the final result has no photoshop touch ups but some little contrast and color enhancement. My goal was to achieve a mix of real and illustration look. Starting from the modeling of the Audrey 3D character in a standard T pose and ending with the sitting pose that you can see in the final render I will try to show you the main steps of the making of this image.

Graphics Tablet

  psd Team
If you're a graphic artist, you may have been told that a graphics tablet can benefit you. .psd Team and our betatesters discuss the features of graphics tablets to help you decide if a tablet is right for you, and which tablet best fits your needs and budget (also look at page 22 on the article: Are tablets worth what you pay? written by great artist Jessica Weaver specially for .psd Magazine)....

Sothink SWF to Video

  Adrian McCanna
Sothink, producer of many Flash and Java tools, have now created the SWF to Video Converter utility, which allows you to convert Flash .swf files to multiple video formats.

Joy of Photography

  Susi Lawson
In this tute we will be taking a beautiful blue sky background and adding it to a whimsical snapshot of a little girl holding her first camera. By following these easy steps you will learn how to seamlessly combine the two images without the dreaded copy and paste look and then smooth the skin and add hair without leaving Photoshop.Unless stated otherwise we will be using the #100 paintbrush throughout.

designer's vision

  Miguel 
First of all, I would like to explain that I’m (still) learning Photoshop mostly on my own, so many of my ways might be different from yours, or people you know. Every designer / artist I met so far, had different approaches in order to achieve similar results, I have learned many tricks from them, and I also came up with a few of my own.

digital lifestyle

   
You have to first ask yourself how important time is in your imaging endeavors. If you highly value the time and money involved in film and developing, you will certainly benefit from a digital camera. If, on the other hand, you simply want to get images into your computer for various reasons, and especially if you want to print big images, you may be happier using a film or flatbed scanner rather than a camera. The reason is...

Robofrog

  Meowza 
Half frog half robot. Her you will see how to show frog's mechanical skeleton. There are many tricks and techniques that graphics artists make during creating such works. I will show you the ways of creation such robofrog art with usage of the basic tools of Photoshop. You can do the same photomanipulation with the other animal or human.

Consumers test - Digital Multimedia Storage and Display

  .psd magazine
Thanks to portable multimedia players that can record audio and video it's not only your music collection that's now accessible on the move. It was not long ago that we were surprised by the idea of being able to carry all our music with us on a device not much bigger than a cassette tape. Nowadays...