Topic awaiting preservation: how to make that sword?

Mahjqa: your sigs are always awesome.

I am trying to make a sword like you have in your sword sig, but I don't have any idea how? Can you please give a little tute about how you made the sword ?

thanks

1. Sketch out your sword

2. Make a path.

3. Fill up the path with blocks of color and gradients.

4. Paint over the colors to add detail.

__________________
War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery,
Ignorance is Strength.

After a bit of fiddling and correcting:

1) make sure you make everything 2x the size you intend the end product to be. It works easier, and you don't notice the little mistakes when you size down.

2) make your shapes with paths or selections (whatever works with you) and fill it with a color. Go to the layers palette and check the box "preserve transparency". (If you can't find it, it's the icon with the checkerboard-patter in it.. if that doesn't work, look it up in the PS help files)

What does preserve transparency do? simple. all the parts of a layer that are transparent, STAY transparent, so you don't have to worry about painting outside the lines. Give it a try if you have no idea what it means, it's much easier to see.

3) grab the brush tool or the airbrush tool, set it to a low opacity, and paint. Pay attention to how the light would fall, where the shadows go and so forth. Some people prefer to use the 'dodge' and 'burn' tools (look 'em up in the helpfile)

4) selections are your friend. If you make a selection, and draw, only the parts IN the selection will be affected. That's great for making sharp edges.

5) Often, you'll want to zoom in to work in detail. If you still want to see how the complete picture is going, click [view > new view] or [window > documents > new window] in Photoshop 7 and up. This creates another window on your document. If you paint in either of the windows, the other will be updated too. A very useful tool to see how the complete picture's going to be.

6) SAVE your layered, big PSD. Then resize your image, and save the small version as another file. This way, if you want to change something afterwards, you'll always have the big image to go back to.

Hope this helps a bit. Please give us a look on how it went, and if you have any more questions, you can always ask.

good info cfb

quote:

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make sure you make everything 2x the size you intend the end product to be. It works easier, and you don't notice the little mistakes when you size down.

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really? That makes more sense to me but i have always been told to work at the same size you are going to have your end product.

quote:

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selections are your friend. If you make a selection, and draw, only the parts IN the selection will be affected. That's great for making sharp edges.

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this is one of the most usefully things that i have learned from you mahjqa. Very helpful.

There is also some great tuts on Gurus' about metal.

Later,

C:\


~Binary is best~

Actually I find CFB's answer quite adequate.

Not that Mahjqa's info isn't appreciable.

As far as working 2x the size you intend to use the image, I personally advise against it. I have never had good results that way. But obviously, that's a rather subjective thing, and needs to fit the way you work.....

thanks guys,,

I will give those tips a whirl as soon as I get some free time off this job I am in.. thanks for the tips guys

One thing you should be not be afraid to use is contrast. Many first timers make the mistake of using too little contrast. As a result, your sword blade will end up looking like it was made out of clay instead of steel.



[This message has been edited by Moth (edited 12-20-2003).]