This was another quick and dirty image for my Sentinel National Novel Writing cover. People who complete Nano can order a free proof copy from Createspace and for that you need a cover. As soon as I tried to use my old one it just didn’t fit, which is why this one is as quick and dirty as it gets. It’s a lot like my Nano Novel now that I think about it. I don’t really like it that much but it works.

The Sentinel is a slightly dystopia urban fantasy story. I think I was too strong on the realism and I used too much Buffyspeak to make it as dreary as it probably should be.

Anyway, the story is about a teenager who becomes a vigilante to protect people who choose to use magic after it reappears in the real world. It tends to jump back and forth between him being a normal teen and being the scary guy pictured above.

Created from a stock image in Photoshop with filters and color variations. I made this to fit the limit of the space alloted on Nanowrimo.org, so I might try to redo this at a realistic dpi.

I liked this one a lot better. I got a better feel for how tools work then the other one and I changed it a bit from the suggestions in the tutorial to “make it my own” as they put in on American Idol.

Spaceship Tutorial

First, I have a copy of CS4 Design Premium on my laptop, so I will be posting my practice pieces here as I learn everything that is not Photoshop. I even learn new things about Photoshop all of the time. Anyone that has messed with Illustrator knows that it is set up completely differently from a paint/photo program because it need to be able to do more. I’m trying to learn what it can do, and how to do some of the things I can do in Photoshop in Illustrator.

Now, I was a little surprised when I saw something so complicated described as a “basic” tutorial and once I saw the finished example I had confirmation. If you check the link below you can see what the final is suppose to look like and the text looks okay but the artist really tried too hard to get the gradients to do extra work. It reminded me of what Poser lovers have started to do is “paint” the hair in Photoshop after rendering so fix lighting/texture problems that are just impossible to fix in Poser. This would be better to make the basic bottle in Illustrator then switch to Photoshop for touch up. What it did explain, it didn’t explain well. It was a lot “do this” but not much “this is why”. For much of it it didn’t even explain what part of the design we were doing – which always helps.

Anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to do the cartoony finishing work and I know how to manipulate text. Some of the stuff I skipped I would have liked to learn, but it wasn’t really being explained so why bother. I try another later after my arm feels better.

Tutorial via Tutorialized.com

I got the concept and some basic layout information off of a online tutorial, but quickly started changing things. The color scheme stayed the same but I resized it because the tutorial was from an age of smaller computers. I personalized the graphics and added some of my own things. I don’t remember what originally gave me the idea for the outline of the buildings, maybe a photo of the California wildfires.

If you’re curious the city is Chicago. They have a very nice skyline.

-X

This one is for my personal blog and the one that got me in the mood to play with these designs again. I was actually going in a more gold direction but it turned silver (actually white) and I fell in love with it. For today. I may need to resize it a bit to stand out properly on the site.

The first piece of new work I’m putting online is the logo for this website. I tried to come up with something several times before I accidentally did this. Not exactly what I was expecting but I feel it works for the site and for me.

Made with Photoshop CS4