The Pen Tool

You would think that at an intermediate/advanced level, I would have mastered the pen tool by now, right? Wrong. I avoid it like the plague, and I go to drastic measures to work out around. Until today. I found a tutorial from psd.tuts (here) that has a file where it gives you a guide that gives you step by step instructions while using the pen tool to trace around some letters. It took me a while to get started but I eventually got the hang of it. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert at this point, but I think I could do some basic things with it.

"Cosmic Love Goddess"

Tutorial can be found here here.

I thought this would be a fun tutorial to get back into Photoshop with. I omitted a couple steps and I really like how to final product turned out without them.

The first step was to take the photo of the model and use the Quick Selection and Refine Edge tool to get rid of the background around her. I also ended up using the Magic Wand tool and the eraser for some of the smaller areas. Then I used two different sky images and a wave image blended together to create the background. After placing the model into the background, I resized and rotated her. I did the same thing with the wings. I duplicated the wings layer and placed one layer under the model layer and one layer above it. Then I used a layer mask to erase the part of the wing that was covering the arm. Next I used some of the hair brushes (link from tutorial) to make her hair super long. I haven't used many brush sets, so it's always nice to use something new and try it out. I added the stars using a soft brush and used the Brush Palette to vary the size and spacing, then set the layer mode to overlay so they blended in the background better. Then I made three different layers for Color Balance, which I have not used before. In the tutorial, it showed different settings for the shadows, midtones and highlights for each of the three layers. The settings created a pink-ish color. Then I used the eraser tool with a soft brush to erase in the middle of the second two layers to get the effect that you see above.

Interface Problems

I had to shrink this to get it to fit, but my interface is there, and then the template is below it. First of all, the interface only takes up about half the width of the page, so I don't know if I need to remake and make it bigger or if this can be adjusted. Then I thought the interface would override the template. Do I need to open a blank page and then put the interface in? I'm really confused as to how to get the interface into Dreamweaver and I can't find a tutorial that explains it. I've been hung up on fixing this for two weeks now and I can't keep remaking this interface.

Designing Web Sites from Photoshop to Dreamweaver

This tutorial included a bunch of different websites that are useful for graphic and web design . One is www.mioplanet.com/product/pixelruler for easy measuring.

In the tutorial, Sue Jenkins creates an interface in Photoshop. It was kind of the same concept as the other interface tutorial. She adds a lot more content though. It was really cool to watch her put everything together. She used the guides on Photoshop, which made it much easier to use the slice tool. She also talks about how to optimize web graphics, and the difference between saving things as a gif, jpeg or png. I learned what a favicon is and how to make one in Photoshop as a 16x16 graphic.

She opened a blank page in Dreamweaver to start.

Interface: Round Two

I decided to remake the interface using the tutorial and opened it in Dreamweaver. This is what happened when I preview it in Firefox.

Spry Menu Bar

I created a spry menu bar instead of using the links from the template. It was really easy to do, especially from watching the tutorial a few posts ago. I deleted the logo section of the page so that the links are now right under the header. I still have to figure out how to center them. Then I just deleted the links codes from the template as well. I removed the sub-menus for now, but I can always add them again later. I like the look of the spry menu bar much more than the sidebar links. I still might make a custom nav bar or spry menu bar if I can figure out how to do it.

Photoshop Interface

I went and did the interface tutorial for Photoshop. I'm not going to repost it since I already made it last Spring. I'm now working on create my own interface that I'm going to use for my own website. Images will be posted soon.


Top of interface:

I'm working with a template in Dreamweaver. I put the image from above as my header and I'm not sure yet if I want to use the header by itself or make a complete interface. I want to create a nav bar and make the links horizontal but it isn't work out so well. I can't find a decent tutorial that explains how to do this.