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This week's Deke's Techniques plays with variations on the Andy Warhol-esque effect you first saw in last week's episode. In this movie, you'll see how to make serigraph-style riffs that are true to Warhol's original artwork, and then transform them into Photoshop-inspired imagery that Andy never got a chance to dream of. By keeping your elements on separate Photoshop layers, you can creatively recolor and offset each of the image elements to your liking. 

As Deke points out, the key to choosing the colors for your variations is to keep your color palette "garish, high-contrast, and small." You can watch the movie to see how Deke swaps out the colors and effects to make a collection of related but different variations, suitable for posthumous auction. 

But back to that color selection thing. When Deke was explaining this to me, he showed me a trick that the movie doesn't cover. And I feel dekeOmaniacs far and wide will find this tip immensely helpful. Let's say you wanted to set up colors that are derived directly from the original Warhol work. You can actually let Photoshop help you grab those colors. Read on to see how.  Read more » 

I've long had a fascination with simulating Andy Warhol-style serigraphs in Photoshop. Regular readers of this blog may recall dekePod episode 18: "The Andy Warhol Silkscreen Effect" from nearly four years ago.

Frankly, tho, looking back on that effect, it sucks. And at the risk of sounding like a self-righteous, born-again prig, so do everyone else's effects, including those that you can render automatically using Warhol-style device and computer apps. Because here's the thing: even though Warhol was an unapologetic capitalist who believed in exploiting art for money's sake, he wasn't an app or a rote set of instructions. He was an eccentric, oddball, affected, doll-hair-wearing, exceedingly commercial artist. In other words, in the broadest possible sense, Warhol was a human being. You know, like in the way Pluto is a planet.

Which is why for this and the next two weeks, I'm going to focus on that most classic of Warhol techniques, the mass-reproducible, celebrity-obsessed silkscreen/serigraph effect. Today, for example, I'll show you how to convert the portrait shot on the left (not an actual celebrity, but perhaps she deserves to be, also very nicely captured by photographer olly at Fotolia) to the work of highly theoretically high art on the right.

A musician friend of mine once told me, dismissively, that Johann Pachelbel wrote his famous Pachelbel's Canon in five minutes while taking a dump. (This isn't an actual fact. It was just my buddy busting Pachelbel's chops.) Difference is, Andy Dub whipped out his creations in a matter of hours, charged thousands of $$$ for them, and later, after he kicked it, Warhol's stuff dredged up millions in postmortem auctions. (Poor toilet-bound Pachelbel: like all musicians, he could not say the same.)

So I guess my point is this: wanna be an artist and get ahead in life and still have people think you're a legitimate talent? Without wearing doll hair? Well, gosh, dunno if that's possible, but here's a start. Read more » 

Upon reviewing this week's technique, I regard it as entirely sound and junk. But I fear it may ask as many questions than it answers. Which is the purpose of art, after all.

In this free video, I show you how to create a seamlessly repeating tile pattern in Photoshop. Which involves as many applications of the Offset filter as it requires leaps of logic. It's all there, but even I had to pause the movie a couple of times and shake the cobwebs out of my head. And I recorded the damn thing! Which just goes to show you . . . not sure what. Read more » 

It's been nearly a month since my last artistic adventure in Deke's Techniques. (I'm thinking of DTs 012: "Creating a High Key, High Contrast Effect.") And so I reckon it's time for another one. In fact, I have two for you. Visitors to this site can watch me turn a photographic image into a faux pen-and-ink drawing. And members of lynda.com can watch a second video in which I turn the same image into a pencil sketch.

Here's the description from high atop Central Headquarters L-dot-C:

For this week's free Photoshop technique, Deke McClelland takes an ordinary portrait shot, applies several filters (two of which he claims to never use under any other circumstances), and transforms the photo into an "ink drawing." By way of Gaussian Blur, Smart Blur (there's one), High Pass, Notepaper (there's the other), and yet more Gaussian blur, you'll learn how to take a photo like the one on the left and achieve a pen-on-paper effect like the one on the right.

Read more » 

Hey gang,

As seems to occur every Tuesday, I have a new free Deke's Techniques video for you, produced by lynda.com. And it's a zinger! (Am I allowed to say "zinger" over the Internet?) In just 9 minutes, I show you how to turn an untreated studio photograph--generously provided by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library--into a high key, high contrast image, with ultra-black shadows but not so much as a single clipped highlight. Read more »