dekePod

This week, I celebrate Deke's Techniques: The Illustrator Challenge with a Photoshop technique. Which is only fair because a couple of weeks ago, I celebrated The Photoshop Challenge with an Illustrator technique, in which I showed you how to draw the antithesis of the Olympic rings. It's what's known as perfect planning.

The above movie shows you how to take last week's artwork and turn it into a screen printing effect, complete with meticulously misregistered colors. It's a great technique (I love this one!) that ends up producing the happy accident below. Look carefully: The black lines appear out-of-sync with the fill colors, white clouds, and blue sky. And the fill colors and white clouds bleed into the blue sky. But the blue sky never bleeds into the fill colors or the white clouds. The result is a work of mitigated chaos. Do you see what I mean?

It's a fun, clever technique. But I worry that it might be a bit hard to follow without the sample file. Which is why I'm providing the screen printing technique sample file here. Right-click the link and choose Download or Save As.

Two questions: Does the movie make sense? And does the sample file help?

While I await your answers, here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

This week's technique is all about hand-coloring a piece of line art in Photoshop. Which sounds pretty easy, right? I mean, grade schoolers and simpletons know how to color inside the lines. It's the mavericks who know how to color outside them!

But see, in Photoshop, the world's playground is a different asylum. The moment you click on the blue Ps icon, coloring inside the lines becomes an exact science involving ancient tools that few but The Elders remember. For example, do you know how to precisely extract all black lines to an independent layer? Or fill regions defined by one layer into another using the Paint Bucket tool? Or color, say, a bird with, say, an ellipse? Or fill in squiggly lines? Have you even heard of the Behind blend mode? Get this: It fills junk behind stuff.

Okay, so this is a long video (14 min). But somehow it goes by in the blink of an eye. Here's the official description from lynda.com:

In this week's happy, idyllic Deke's Techniques, Deke shows you a range of tips and tricks for coloring a line drawing in Photoshop. Although filling in black outlines on a white background seems like a fairly straightforward task at first glance, there are a lot of ways to inadvertently spill your colors outside their designated areas. Even in a simple drawing like this one, you can see how there might be a lot of nooks and crannies (namely, those squiggles!) to deal with.

Read more » 

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 » 

Today, I unveil a series of three sequential contests that I'm calling Deke's Techniques: The Challenge, in which I invite you to create a training movie for me. The first contest, which begins today, July 17, and lasts for two weeks (ending Tuesday, July 31) is the Photoshop Challenge. So, naturally, I'm asking for a technique created, at least in part, in Photoshop. (You can use other programs as well if you like.) Two finalists and one Grand Prize winner will receive a buttload of prizes.

Your movie has to reference, however obliquely, at least three of my existing Deke's Techniques. And so, by way of a proof of concept, I present you with my submission, in which I transform a little lemon of a Yugo into a fiery hot rod. And I do so using, not three Deke's Techniques, but five!

No movie can be longer than 10 minutes, so I burn through the process very quickly, possibly more quickly than even an adept Photoshop user will be able to follow. But that's okay for two reasons: First, I give you permission to move quickly through your technique as well. (You may need to!) And second, I include six follow-up movies, available for free at lynda.com/dt, that explain the entire process at a reasonable and followable speed.

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

Just returned from a fantastic Fourth of July, during which I and my two boys watched the fireworks of the San Francisco Bay from the heights of Angel Island. Wow! And now I'm bound for a few days off-the-grid at Camp Sacramento. Wow!

In between, I thought I'd sneak in a quick post about this week's thrilling episode of Deke's Techniques, in which we take that superhero shield that we created last week in Illustrator and reimagine it in Photoshop.

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