OK, first things first, I got my ticket today, so that is all sorted. I leave in just shy of two weeks.

Next up is the image spotlight. At the moment these are comming on a random basis, but I will be trying to get one a week up or a fortnight, depending on how I set into a routine.

For starters, here is the final image:

As to why I have chosen this image, firstly I made it recently, making the process fresh in my mind, and secondly it was a new exercise for me. This image wasnt based on any tutorials, and as such you will find none at the bottom of this page.

It began as an attempt to recreate a similar feel to one of the brush sets i used in the top area of this site, in a sort of grungy distressed way. It was also a great way for me to learn about manipulating custom shapes and, once again, smart layers to create effects that i wanted.

Ok, to start off, i just had a white background, nothing special there. Then i created a new layer, and turned it into a smart object. This let me work on the logo as if it was a brand new document, which is kinda neat. It also ment that i could make the logo in a high resoloution, and there-by use it again later if I want, even if it was in a poster.

Here is the logo on its own:


OK, the logo is built up of a complex group of vector shapes and cliping masks.the circles are obviously circles with other circles subtracted from them. The part circles were made by using a cliping mask to cut sections out and then adding yet another circle to make the ends rounded. All of the arrows are from the custom shapes palet that came default with photoshop, and the drips were made using the round cornered rectangle tool. After this I saved the smart object and returned to the main doccument.

Ok, here comes a fundamental rule of Photoshop: If you are going to edit something destructively, copy it first! If you are trying to re-create this, then duplicate the smart object, turn one of them invisible and put it to the bottom of the document. This means that if you stuff up, you still have a carbon-copy of the original layer to go back to. After doing exactly that, i turned the other copy, the one that was still visible, and rasterised it. This takes the smart object and turns it into normal pixels that you can work with using tools like the brush and eraser tools.

At this stage a plain white background was starting to become a bit boring, so I moved onto the blue-black gradient that is in the background. Diverging from the logo for another second,  i then used the blue and black colors again to render a set of clouds, and then the color half tone filter (which can be found under filter>pixilate>color halftone). I used the settings, 8px max size, and 20 on all the angels to give me the black halftone effect. Set it to multiply and your done with the background!

Ok now for the worn look on the logo. This takes some time, but I went arround the edge of the logo, carefully erasing with various brushes. Faux finish and wet media are good default brush palets to use, or grunge sets will work just as well. This was actually the most time consuming part of the image, even more than the logo, because I was tinkering for ages!

Here is the "distressed" logo: