Dan Selleck is an Interactive Designer in Portland OR.
He specializes in web design, web development, and illustration.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Otis




I finished Otis the other day, he's part of my new 'comic' style that I've been toying with.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Creating the Fishmarketing.com header

A little while ago I redid the fishmarketing.com site. The first order of buisness was to create a stunning appearance; in this tutorial I will show you how i did the header for the site. So, let's jump right in:

The first step is the creation of you basic line work. In order to recreate the effects in this tutorial you must have your line work on white paper.



You must then scan in your line work at 300dpii and import it into Adobe Photoshop. We have a more recent version of Photoshop here at the office, so this tutorial may not fit exactly what you have on your computer but it will be accurate from Photoshop version 7.0 or newer. Now that you have your line work open in Photoshop we can add some color. I like to start out with a base color that all of my shadows and highlights will be put on. To do this, we need to create a new layer on top of our line work and set the layer style to Multiply. This will allow you to color on top of your drawing without compromising the line work.



After we have the base colors in place we can start utilizing the layer blending modes. You can access the layer blend menu by double clicking on the specific layer you want to create a layer blend effect on. Double click your Multiply layer and then select the checkbox next to Gradient Overlay. After you've done this, select Overlay in the Gradient Overlay's blending mode drop down. By setting the Gradient Overlay's blend mode to Overlay we can start to change the colors of the drawing without having to color them ourselves. (You can also adjust the transparency of the Gradient; I usually put mine around 40%.)



Finally, create a layer above the Multiply layer and set the blending mode to Overlay. Usually the Overlay layer is too intense so I usually set this layer to 40% transparency and then start painting with a circle airbrush.



As you can see in the last insert that my colors differ greatly from the previous step. If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me an email: dan@danselleck.com