dynamic

Deke's Techniques 036: Designing a Magically Updating Pattern

Submitted by deke on 6 September 2011 - 11:15pm.
Deke's Techniques 036: Designing a Magically Updating Pattern

Hey gang. Tonight finds me at Photoshop World in Las Vegas. Earlier today I taught my four-hour "precon" workshop, Photoshop 3D Fundamentals, and I'm happy to report, it was a scintillating sold-out success. Afterward, I had a beer with a member of the Photoshop 3D development team who filled me in on some upcoming developments. I can't share details, but it all sounded very encouraging. (Suffice it to say, it sounds like everything I pissed and moaned about in either my session or my Photoshop 3D videos for lynda.com is begin addressed.)

I mention this because, well, it means that I'm getting around to posting this week's Deke's Techniques many hours later than normal. Fortunately, the technique is worth the wait. This week, I show you how to design a magically updating pattern in Illustrator. The movie (which itself is quite magical) is a kind of two-parter. In the first three and a half minutes, I show you how to fill a page with a repeating pattern using Illustrator's best and most powerful dynamic effect, Transform. After that, I show you how to update the entire page by editing a few base path outlines. Along the way, I integrate another dynamic effect, Roughen.

Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

. Tagged with:

I'm Geeking Out on Ambigrams

Submitted by deke on 1 August 2011 - 6:30am.

Every once in a while, I go on a creative bender. I'm not proud of it; it's just the way I'm built. Yesterday (and a bit of this morning), my artistic tonic of choice was the obscure 19th-century art of the ambigram. (Update: Click the previous sentence to see the video, now live on lynda.com.) You know, those words that read the same way regardless of how you rotate the page. For example, here's my name. Turn it upside-down and it's still my name. Damn, I have a long name.

My name in ambigram

An ambigram can also be a piece of art that reads as one word one way and becomes another when turned upside-down. For example, can you guess what this word looks like when spun 180 degrees?

Creative artwork ambigram

If you guessed "cat vomit," you're wrong. Here's the correct answer: Read more » 

. Tagged with:

The Fake HDR Portrait Technique, Revealed

Submitted by deke on 13 October 2008 - 1:41am.

As those of you who know a thing or two about what goes on 'round here know, last week's dekePod was devoted to the topic of faking an HDR portrait. As usual, the technique flew by in the blink of a bug's eye. A really scary, creepy bug's eye. Which is the idea, of course. Few know this, but dekePod won this year's Nobel Prize in Subliminal Anti-Training. (They give out that particular award in a tiny, dimly lit room off the janitor's closet, so it's not widely covered.)

But anti-training doesn't always work. In fact, one study suggests it kills roughly 1 out every of 16 lab rats. (Thankfully, we haven't heard of any human fatalities--yet.) Which is why I offer this traditional step-by-step description, as it applies to my youngest son, Sammy, who quite obviously really enjoys his ice cream.

Sam becomes HDR Read more » 

. Tagged with:

Illustrator Transparency + Photoshop Resolve, Part 1

Submitted by deke on 29 June 2008 - 1:50am.

In this two-part article, we’ll take a low-quality digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano:

And transform it into a work of otherworldly vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be Adobe Illustrator’s Transparency palette. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop oversees the final production.

Here's the idea: Illustrator allows you to assign varying levels of transparency to vector-based objects. That’s great because, as we’ll see, it makes for a remarkably versatile drawing environment. The problem is, Adobe's original vector-based technology, PostScript, doesn’t accommodate transparency. And given that PostScript has long been and continues to be the professional-level commercial reproduction standard, this conflict seems to raise a red flag: How can Illustrator make art that PostScript can't print? Read more » 

. Tagged with: