iPod Silhouette With BRUSHES!

My creation. My child. The project I've been working on for over a week. And I must admit I really like how it turned out! It was very difficult at first and I never would have created something that looked respectable with the pre-loaded Photoshop brushes. So the first day or so was downloading and searching for many different brushes on Brusheezy. At the end of the project I have 70 MB of Photoshop brush files on my flash drive. Next was adding the brushes to the right place while using the right color. I did the outer ones first, making them all basic fire colors because I wasn't sure how I wanted the more centralized brushes to look. After going through brush after brush I found the theme I wanted and went with it! All in all, fun project, really love using these cool brushes!

Brushes Free Form

This is my first time messing with brushes in Photoshop. The assignment was kind of difficult since there was no guidance or things to look for other than "create a cool, abstract image" but it was fun to be able to create something from scratch. Most of this was created with scatter brushes, except the solid swirl.

iPod Silhouette

Source picture, me jumping in the hallway!

My iPod silhouette created in Photoshop. Turning my picture into a silhouette was simple with the hardest part being selecting the right stuff, but I had a hard time getting the iPod along with headphones to look realistic. The pen tool was frustrated and took many times to get the right flow of wire, and then adding the brush to it was weird at first because it was the first time working with brushes. Ear buds were made with the paintbrush, just putting a dot at the end of the wire. And then putting fingers over the iPod. I spent a full day trying to get fingers to go over that iPod and look good. Eventually I got it, and it looks realistic enough. Next assignment: making abstract art with brushes, I'm ready!

Combining Silhouettes With Simple Illustrations

Source Image

In this tutorial I took the original image and first masked out the rock part from the background. Then I smoothed out the edges (after a few tries, it was tricky finding which layer and settings to smooth) and filled it all with this dark brown color. I created a gradient in the background and made a low-opacity  layer of the flower symbols in the sky while masking it to keep it only on the background. I used the same masking effects to put the sun symbols only on the rock, and made it low opacity as well.

Quick Collage Using Vectors

Source picture #1

Source picture #2

This is my rendition created by following a tutorial on combining collages and vector images. I liked using vector images again, it reminded me of the good old days with Illustrator... The hardest part was knowing which layer to select to create the many masks and different effects. I'm glad we got a harder tutorial to work on, because harder assignments typically look much better in the outcome than easy ones. 

Motorcycle and Odometer Collage

Source picture #1

Source picture #2 (The Odometer)

The hardest part to this tutorial was finding the right odometer! Surprisingly there aren't many pictures out there of speeding odometers. Ones without watermarks that is.  I ended up using a picture from the tutorial, using the crop tool to take out the parts that weren't needed. A new skill was used by adding a gradient to the layer mask, which wasn't very new except trying to get the gradient in the right position to hide those pesky picture boundaries!

Monkey Face

Our next Photoshop assignment: replacing a young boy's head with a monkey's face and then add a hat.   Never would have guessed I'd be doing this in High School! Used the same masking effect as with the montage girls, only slightly more complicated with getting pictures to size right and fit together in a certain way.