Lesson 1 — Colors, Shapes and Lines

We'll call this one "The Old Man Expresses His Feelings About Shapes." I've never really gotten along with shapes, or vector art in general. PS adds a dimension, by allowing me to add pattern layer effects. It is nice, I suppose, to be able to include regular polygons in my work, so I'll try to remember that it's possible for the few times I want to.

What do I like about this?

Discovering that I could use the Edit>Distort>Perspective to work with the joined shapes which compose the mouth. The pattern effect on the nose came out pretty well.

What do I not like about this?

I think it's lame, because I couldn't put aside my feelings and work up any enthusiasm for the work. I did it, it's done, let's move on.

So here's the key and the lock.

What do I like about this?

I didn't know about the "Exclude overlapping shape areas" option. That's pretty cool. I've been going through a lot of hopping around to get that effect, and here's a command that does it automatically.

What do I not like about this?

I don't have enough motivation to think of anything that I want a custom shape of, so I just followed the tutorial like an old Brown Shirt.

This one, I had a little more fun with — obviously. That's my former roommate's nephew Ian. He, as you can tell from the photo, is one cool kid. Behind the keyhole is a portion of Bierstadt's Cho-Look, painted at Yosemite. So, for me, this is a double winner: Ian and Bierstadt in the same piece. Wooo-hooo!

What do I like about this?

I got to use Ian and Bierstadt. I like the way the gradient works with Ian in the center. I (mostly) like the way the layer effect worked on the key and the keyhole.

What do I not like about this?

It bugs me that the bevelling got the overlap between the key and the keyhole. There's no doubt a way to avoid that, but I couldn't find it. True, I only took 10 minutes trying to find it. I should have taken more time to get the Corner Ians positioned a bit better, and probably should have allowed more of his sweatshirt to show on the corner pieces, but there wasn't much more free, as his mother was holding him up and I wasn't really interested in her hands.

We'll call this little piece "The Poacher's Nightmare." When I discovered that a negative value for arrowheads produced spearheads, I was off and running. I had to make a spearhead fence. Then I had to apply some texture for it, so that it looked like it actually sat out in the elements. Well, you don't have a fence for nothing, so I went looking for a picture of a castle in the far distance but found Tom Beecham's "Whitetail Deer" first and decided to use that. Complete step-by's can be found here.

What do I like about this?

The texture on the vertical spears came out nice. Adding the fog to soften then (previously) sharp effect of the deer worked well.

What do I not like about this?

It's too small, but I've got the directions, in case I want to redo it at a bigger size. I'm not sure that I like the log in the lower left, but perhaps it works, after all.

How do you feel about shapes now, George?

It would have taken a long time to make the spears without them. I have to admit that. I'll play more.

And here we have "The Curtain". Can I just tell you how long I've been searching for a way to make curtains? Do you remember when Toronto won the World Series? Yeah, that long. This will literally eat up hours and it's so simple I'll explain it here, rather than making you open a new window.

Make a Noise Gradient. Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. Pick something. Accept the defaults for everything except Texture. Choose the appropriate channel (because this one had lots of green, I chose the green channel). I chose Height = 72.

What do I like about this?

I can make curtains!

What do I not like about this?

I've got more assignments, a bunch of housework, and some officework to do. I can't spend the rest of the day playing with all the possibilities this has opened.

I cheated here. The one on the left follows the directions.

The one on the right, I added a couple of black lines and rotated them, too. Then I used the Texturizer to add Burlap (73, 5) and — of course — then began playing with Lighting Effects to bring out the texture even more.

Well, this may or may not meet the requirements of the assignment, but ...

I was playing with the halftones, as suggested when all of a sudden, I realized that this could produce the kind of light maps I wanted for a couple of other pieces. Uh, light maps: when you paste a black and white pattern into a new Channel and then select that channel back in the main picture, you can apply graded effects to the area selected. I realize that that is about as poor an explanation, but maybe it gives you an idea.

So, anyway, I stole Jack Vettriano's "The Billy Boys", created three different halftone patterns in another document, pasted one into the green channel, fiddled with layers on the main layer; pasted another one into the blue channel and fiddled again in main layer. Finally, I took the one with the smallest granularity and pasted it into channel 4 (alpha channel), selected channel 4 and applied another gradient into the halftone pattern. That just about obliterated the picture — but I remembered Edit > Fade. When I got the fade down to 50%; it worked.

What do I like about this?

The two middle boys in the spotlight. The glistening of the beach on the right.

What do I not like about this?

The beach on the left doesn't glisten, and *looking at moccasins, blushing with shame* that I got so carried away, I didn't take good notes.

Just playing around here. A number of linear blends, a couple of shapes, a halftone and a stolen Rackham.

Maybe an Artist's Statement will come later. Right now, I'll just post and read.