Newbie in graphics.
- Thread starter JOLTEON42
- Start date
*is tempted to say "don't use it" * 
Well my personal stance on being a newbie at any craft is to not jump right into actual use of works until you hit the stage where you're able to make stuff worthy of being used. There's always a stage where it's all about practice and learning stuff and experimenting with new stuff, basically coming into the field for the first time. At that point in time I feel it's best to refine stuff first. This place has a lot of gfx people so it's a good learning environment.
On to your pic. only 2 main things I'd have to say.
1. I don't think the BG is good enough. There's a lack of blending with the foreround element and it has a very strong vibe of a stock art googled from somewhere and having a Jolteon also googled from somewhere hastily copy+pasted onto it. I'd recommend switching to a more suitable BG. And finding a better Jolteon too. This one has jpeg artifacts on it.
2. The font doesn't blend well either unfortunately... but I tend to not like the idea of putting words in front of a high-LOD background so I have this opinion about not liking words on the banners even on some of the best banners on this forum.
I cant speak more on it as I'm not a gfx artist and lack the expertise to properly critique. But most of the others should be suitable, and willing to help.
Well my personal stance on being a newbie at any craft is to not jump right into actual use of works until you hit the stage where you're able to make stuff worthy of being used. There's always a stage where it's all about practice and learning stuff and experimenting with new stuff, basically coming into the field for the first time. At that point in time I feel it's best to refine stuff first. This place has a lot of gfx people so it's a good learning environment.
On to your pic. only 2 main things I'd have to say.
1. I don't think the BG is good enough. There's a lack of blending with the foreround element and it has a very strong vibe of a stock art googled from somewhere and having a Jolteon also googled from somewhere hastily copy+pasted onto it. I'd recommend switching to a more suitable BG. And finding a better Jolteon too. This one has jpeg artifacts on it.
2. The font doesn't blend well either unfortunately... but I tend to not like the idea of putting words in front of a high-LOD background so I have this opinion about not liking words on the banners even on some of the best banners on this forum.
I cant speak more on it as I'm not a gfx artist and lack the expertise to properly critique. But most of the others should be suitable, and willing to help.
Get GIMP. Also look at my tutorial and others for good help.
I was emphasising about the lack of blending which made it look like you just grabbed a jolteon, a BG and a font from somewhere and pasted them altogether.
I'll demonstrate:
I made the BG myself, wrote the text myself, and drew the Kyurem myself. And then just combined them on Gimp in 1 minute.
But the elements don't blend nicely. So what happens is there's a level of aesthetic appeal that just isn't there and the picture simply looks bland. Good blending usually means going beyond just having 3 layers in your psd file. Stuff like alpha, lighting, shadow definitions, blur etc. they have to be exploited.
Even assuming you put effort into the BG...
...it's still not going to blend if you don't make it blend.
Even small additions like a dodge airbrush
...can go a long way.
I'll demonstrate:
I made the BG myself, wrote the text myself, and drew the Kyurem myself. And then just combined them on Gimp in 1 minute.
But the elements don't blend nicely. So what happens is there's a level of aesthetic appeal that just isn't there and the picture simply looks bland. Good blending usually means going beyond just having 3 layers in your psd file. Stuff like alpha, lighting, shadow definitions, blur etc. they have to be exploited.
Even assuming you put effort into the BG...
...it's still not going to blend if you don't make it blend.
Even small additions like a dodge airbrush
...can go a long way.
If he already has photoshop, he won't need Gimp. Photoshop is everything Gimp is, and more.pokemaister899 said:
The background looks like it was made with the cloud filter and some tinkering with brightness/contrast for the lightning...am I right? If that's the case, that tells me you've got potential. You know a few tricks with Photoshop, but you need work with things like color schemes and composition.
As it is, Jolteon doesn't jive very well with that background--he's too bright, and the lightning is too random. Try making it flow in the same direction of Jolteon's movement, or center it all around him. You might want to consider using brushes for that sort of thing too, as opposed to doing it from scratch.
As it is, Jolteon doesn't jive very well with that background--he's too bright, and the lightning is too random. Try making it flow in the same direction of Jolteon's movement, or center it all around him. You might want to consider using brushes for that sort of thing too, as opposed to doing it from scratch.
It's really just the same as before, since it looks like you took a BG, took a render, and pasted the render on the BG. One thing that I do to blend my sigs are:
-Duplicate the render multiple times, and smudge the bottom layers some.
-Erase around the edges of your render.
-Paste some effects on top of your render.
-As XieRH said, adding some lighting helps (assuming you use Photoshop, you can go to Filter-Render-Lighting Effects).
-Duplicate the render multiple times, and smudge the bottom layers some.
-Erase around the edges of your render.
-Paste some effects on top of your render.
-As XieRH said, adding some lighting helps (assuming you use Photoshop, you can go to Filter-Render-Lighting Effects).
JOLTEON42JOLTEON42 said:
No!
Gliscor said:
^ what he said
Jolteon42, you can't let photoshop filters do all the work for you. There is no escaping the fact that you need to pick up your stylus and manually brush some stuff. You need to set up layers for shadow definition, layer masking for alpha manipulation, layer for bloom, and a bunch of other things needed (which depends on the nature of the pic).
If you looked at the 3rd kyurem I did just now you might notice the front of its body is darker. That was manually airbrushed on a Multiply layer. It's there to compensate for the shadow definition on the kyurem not matching the light source (also on a separate layer).
kk a quick question.
what photoshop do you use?
Anyway on the first tag
-most areas have been mentioned except for the canvas size. Personally I think it is a bad size to use. Most signatures tend to be 400px Long and I generally make mine 200-250px high.
-Now the first thing you should work on is colour co-ordination. Since Jolteon is a yellow type of colour you'd be generally going for your yellow or orange colours so it blends better. As a beginner I recommend starting off with brushes to make your backgrounds. In this time you can learn the basics of making a signature. Those being the rule of thirds, placement and text (hate text.)
Some Tips:
-After getting a general feel to the program I recommend moving onto smudge, blending and depth. Just learn to smudge because no matter how experienced a GFX artist is they usually do incorporate smudge into their work one way or another. Now having a smudged background and a normal render isn't going to look to appealing. So then learn to blend in your render. Smudge is the obvious choice in a smudge background; however there are other ways such as blurring and slight erasion to the render. Depth will be a minor but important thing to learn. I have a depth tutorial which is linked in my signature and explains the many ways to add depth. But basically depth tries to draw the focus to your render.
-Now when you master all said before you've probably reached the high novice-semi intermediate skill range. Now you can work on more advanced effects such as c4ds,fractals, clipping masks,flow and stocks. C4ds and Fractals will be the most seen effects around forums these days. They really are cool but you can not simply slap them on. It takes time to position them as well as erase the icky parts. Fractals are more used for lighting effects and minor effects but really do look awesome when used properly. To get an idea of what these look like visit deviantART, Planetrenders or simply google image. Stocks are by far my favourite things to use. Stocks can be used as backgrounds or can also include your focal. Using stocks is a lot different than renders.
Now sorry to lazy to explain the rest of the more advanced stuff right now because you obviously having the basics to cover. But unfortunately I'm barely going to be GFXing or even on this site for long but as you can see we have a growing and supportive GFX community here to support you.
And wow can't believe I just wrote all that haha
PS. Visit my tutorials page to get a tutorials on most of what was mentioned in this post!
what photoshop do you use?
Anyway on the first tag
-most areas have been mentioned except for the canvas size. Personally I think it is a bad size to use. Most signatures tend to be 400px Long and I generally make mine 200-250px high.
-Now the first thing you should work on is colour co-ordination. Since Jolteon is a yellow type of colour you'd be generally going for your yellow or orange colours so it blends better. As a beginner I recommend starting off with brushes to make your backgrounds. In this time you can learn the basics of making a signature. Those being the rule of thirds, placement and text (hate text.)
Some Tips:
-After getting a general feel to the program I recommend moving onto smudge, blending and depth. Just learn to smudge because no matter how experienced a GFX artist is they usually do incorporate smudge into their work one way or another. Now having a smudged background and a normal render isn't going to look to appealing. So then learn to blend in your render. Smudge is the obvious choice in a smudge background; however there are other ways such as blurring and slight erasion to the render. Depth will be a minor but important thing to learn. I have a depth tutorial which is linked in my signature and explains the many ways to add depth. But basically depth tries to draw the focus to your render.
-Now when you master all said before you've probably reached the high novice-semi intermediate skill range. Now you can work on more advanced effects such as c4ds,fractals, clipping masks,flow and stocks. C4ds and Fractals will be the most seen effects around forums these days. They really are cool but you can not simply slap them on. It takes time to position them as well as erase the icky parts. Fractals are more used for lighting effects and minor effects but really do look awesome when used properly. To get an idea of what these look like visit deviantART, Planetrenders or simply google image. Stocks are by far my favourite things to use. Stocks can be used as backgrounds or can also include your focal. Using stocks is a lot different than renders.
Now sorry to lazy to explain the rest of the more advanced stuff right now because you obviously having the basics to cover. But unfortunately I'm barely going to be GFXing or even on this site for long but as you can see we have a growing and supportive GFX community here to support you.
And wow can't believe I just wrote all that haha
PS. Visit my tutorials page to get a tutorials on most of what was mentioned in this post!
ok on that one the colours do match better which was one of the aspects I mentioned.
Now I'm not sure how you're using your brushes but it may work better if you separate them in different layers.
Reason being. Right now you have pretty much all of darkrai covered in brushes which isn't too good of an idea.
I'd start off with just your background than brush a little to get some effects going. Than insert your Darkrai image on a new layer. Create yet another new layer and brush a little bit more subtle and take into account the flow and how well it 'blends' in the image. Preferably there should be brush strokes around it's sides to kind of blend it into the background effects but make sure that the face is clear and has minimal brushes coverring it
Now I'm not sure how you're using your brushes but it may work better if you separate them in different layers.
Reason being. Right now you have pretty much all of darkrai covered in brushes which isn't too good of an idea.
I'd start off with just your background than brush a little to get some effects going. Than insert your Darkrai image on a new layer. Create yet another new layer and brush a little bit more subtle and take into account the flow and how well it 'blends' in the image. Preferably there should be brush strokes around it's sides to kind of blend it into the background effects but make sure that the face is clear and has minimal brushes coverring it
Sometimes there is just trial and error involved with stuff. Experiment and see what you can come up with.
Before asking others if it's "good", it's also preferable to ask yourself if you liked how your own art turned out. Ultimately your personal standards take precedence over that of others.
Before asking others if it's "good", it's also preferable to ask yourself if you liked how your own art turned out. Ultimately your personal standards take precedence over that of others.