Anime sig

Yea I worked on this one for a while. It's definitely my best one yet I think, mostly because I did this after I learned a lot more things to do in PS. CNC please.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...as/Katsumi.jpg

It is by far your best, but! One thing dont set the render on luminosity. Thats a no no, other than that its nice :)

Luminosity? I didn't click anything called luminosity, haha.

The latyer settings on the layer pallete, It looks like you set it to luminocity and it took all the color outta the render and blended in with the sig.

No I just did a hue/saturation and a color balance. I just did it different layers. And one layer I blended in with the previous layer. Oh well, I'll figure out what I did wrong next time I do another sig.

Just next time dont color the render with the sig, use the colors of the render as a guide to color the sig, and make sure the color balance layer is under the render :)

Okay thanks a lot! ^_^

So you're saying to try to make the background the color of the render, not the other way around?

Sorta, just dont make it extrmely mono like you ahve been, let the render retain its original color. And dont go crazy making the bg match the render but dont make it a horrid clash

Yes and no. Most people here put a render in there and then use some grungey brushes and brush randomly with colors that are similar to that of the render. I say be different. I tell this to everybody, but I rarely see it. Try putting the render in more of an environment. It doesn't have to be scenery, landscape or a building or anything like that, it just has to have depth. It has to be a "place" for the render to be in rather than be on top of. Dont colorize the whole signature the same color. Thats boring. I'm not a big fan of the lighter colored brushing on the left side. It looks like it was done with the same sized brush with the same flow the whole time. Vary it and mix it up a bit if your going to do that. Dont do like an inner glow around the edge of the signature either. The border is a divide between the content in the signature to whatever is outside of it (in this case, these forums). It doesn't need to fade into the border. Borders typically look better as 1 pixel, but its fine if you want to use 2. Dont use the NeverWinter font. Use something simpler. Let the content of the signature be complex. Keep the border and the typography simple. A sarif font gives it more of a classic or grand look while a non sarif font can give it a rougher or less fancy feel. Use less text as well. The "Broken into a thousand pieces" isn't necessary. A signature by definition is something that identifies you. So the most youd need is your name (in my opinion). The outer glow around the render isn't doing much for it. All its doing is separating the render from the background, it isn't blending it into it. Keep up the work, but in the future use more colors (look at a color wheel if you need to see what works well together).

Alright thanks for the advice, but you pretty much told me to change the entire sig. I thought it looked really good.

To both of you:

When you said keep the render its original color, did you mean something like this? It was my first sig.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...SigAltered.jpg

hehe I'm just a tough critic (as the text in my signature says). I'm trying to help you so that you have a better sense of design and aesthetics so you know what looks good, what doesnt, what to do and what not to do in the future :D Don't linger on the way one signature turns out, just keep in mind what I told you for the next piece that you do (hopefully sometime youll move on from signatures/avatars and make actual pieces of art lol). I'll let you know if you improve, what you've done better and what you still need to do better ;)

edit: It looks much more interesting with color, but don't blur the edges. I'm guessing you ran across some jags during the cut job, at least around the face. Remember what I said about text and background as well

Okay thanks a lot guys for the comments. Hopefully it'll help me improve my next sig.

By the way Jack, when you said make actual pieces of art, what did you mean? Like full size images?

Yes full sized images. Also something hopefully without renders/characters. I'm talking about something you made completely yourself on a bigger scale than a signature. Like I said a signature is something that identifies you. You dont need to keep identifying yourself with different little pictures all the time. What are you identifying yourself as if you constantly make signatures but your not making any art (the kind I just described)? I dont see it as much of an artist. Its like if you were a traditional artist and you wanted to do paintings. And you spent all of your time on how to sign the corner of your painting but none of the time actually doing any painting. Not much of an artist huh. After you learn more of the ins and outs of photoshop and get better at all of this, I hope you'll start "painting" rather than "signing the painting's corner" ;)

Haha I liked how you put that. But I wouldn't know how to do anything on that large of a scale and something so drastic. Like I have just begun learning PS. I wouldn't know how to create something from scratch, especially since I suck at drawing any form of character/person.

Thats ok. I never did signatures. I started out doing things at about 500x500. Did some pictures only using filters for the first week or two. After that I decided to try out brushing. Digital painting (aka brushing) was the next phase I went through. Then I got into vectoring. Finally, I started 3d. So now I do some of all 3. Never have I done a sig (or any image) in which Ive used a render or anything that isn't a free stock photo. From my experience and watching other people progress, I've seen that the fastest track is to work on bigger canvas sizes and making things from scratch. I'm not trying to tell anybody to stop using renders or anything, so lets not get into that :D I'm just saying what I did and what seems to be to be the fastest way to get around the graphics learning curve (which I'm still moving around myself obviously). So to sum up Tobias, I think you should just work on larger scales anyway. Whether or not it would turn out the way you want. The more mistakes you make, the more things you try to fix them and hence the more tricks you learn to fix things when you come across them in the future.

Thanks ^_^ I appreciate your help. I'll start messing around with stuff, although I can't draw digital ... I'm a good artist on paper, but nothing that great on computer. Unless I scan my drawn pictures in, and use THEM as renders. Hmmm...