Saturday 30 April 2011

Futurepoly Week 3

Another Day and another update From Futurepoly. Week three was with Thomas Scholes and was all about techniques and tricks with photoshop that you can use to speed things up or solve problems. He showed a ton of very interesting approaches which I'll certainly be trying out and seeing how I can incorporate them into my workflow.
The main focus of the homework this week was the use of custom shapes, a technique that was recently made famous on the concept boards by Nicolas Bouvier aka Sparth. I've used this before in my work after seeing Nicolas post but I've never limited myself to solely using it to make thumbnails so I thought this would be a good test.

In my first batch of thumbs I just wanted to do black and white


Whilst doing my second lot of thumbs I added more value changes to create depth, I also started to make more structured shapes.


Finally I played around with some of the thumbs applying a few of the other techniques, such as painting with the smudge brush, sneaky transformation tricks, and custom brushes again for detailing. I didn't stick to my thumb as I wanted to use this image as an experiment so it ended up a bit odd but it was interesting just trying stuff out.


With the next custom shape images I want try just useing custom shapes and gradients and little or no painting at all, should be fun.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

hiya mate
these are great! look forward to more :)

jake gumbleton said...

looking slick mr Ryan! Great stuff you've been a learning.

Mike Yamada said...

I've been wondering about this for a while and its nice to see a breakdown of the custom shape process. Sounds like a cool class