reflect

Last week, as if to demonstrate what you can do---even at the last minute---by way of a video tutorial, I dropped everything I was doing and recorded a Deke's Techniques in which I showed you how to create the interlocking Olympic rings in my dearly beloved Adobe Illustrator. They used to look like this:

A few days later, my movie vanished. The Olympic rings---the very ones you see above this paragraph---are in fact trademarked. Fair enough. But Fair Use clearly states that I can show you how to create them because they represent a universal (not to mention, inspirational) cultural touch point and they make for an interesting project: The blue ring is at once above the yellow one and at the same time behind it. How is such a thing possible in a constrained environment such as Illustrator's, in which one path is either forward or in back of another?

Do you understand? I'm not telling you to rip off a corporate logo and make it your own; I am teaching you how to make cool stuff based on something you know and love.

But there is the chance that the holder of this particular trademark might take offense at my use of its property for educational purposes. Which is why my original video went up one day and came down soon thereafter.

No worries. My techniques aren't about specific files or artwork; they're about the larger techniques themselves, which you can apply to anything you like. Read more » 

Have you ever wanted to take a photograph of a client, friend, or loved one, and make that person appear to emerge from water, in Photoshop? Like that she or he is looking at you from inside some sort of very happy natural hot springs? Well, sure you have.

And if not, at the very least, today's technique includes a comical intro.

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

Having returned safely from a memorable weekend at Jazz Fest in New Orleans (half horrible :-( half awesome :-) I promise to share more later this week), it is once again time to share with you a very special technique. This one's about creating type that reflects in junk 'n' stuff in Photoshop.

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

Hello all. In this week's Technique, I show you how to draw a classic heart shape in Adobe Illustrator. The introductory graphic is a bit misleading. I don't actually add the stylized highlights and shadows. Nor do I add the nipples. (But, you know, isn't it interesting how two innocent ellipses can turn something so harmless into something mildly salacious? Read more » 

This week I take a photo of an everyday average woman screaming her brains out and double-map her onto a photograph of shattered glass (both from the Fotolia image library). Is she singing so loudly she breaks a mirror? Or is she a photo stuck behind the glass, shouting to get out? I ask those questions twice more inside the video, so please enjoy my repetition. Read more »