Day 29: Bad Magic

Welcome back to Thingadailies.

If I were plotting Thingadailies, I would be ending on a high point — maybe an image that showed off all the skills I've learned this month. But no. I'm ending the month with something random, which is totally in keeping with previous Thingadailies.

After trying to find something I wanted to do, I settled on this tutorial on Glowing Magic Effects, which would be practical for me to learn. Unfortunately, I wasn't really in a "follow the directions" sort of mood, and also, it turns out I have no idea how to determine the saturation of a color. So I diverged from the tutorial pretty quickly.

Still, it was kind of interesting, so I'm leaving it here. (Also, I have to post something.)

Step 1: Draw the basic shape with a color that has 50% saturation.

Or, if you're me, ignore that thing about saturation because it's a word that doesn't really have any meaning, and pick a color and draw a shape.

Step 2: Sketch out the curves so it looks more smokey

Step 3: Increase the saturation and add highlights.

The interesting thing here was switching the pen mode to "dodge". Also I had started messing with colors by this point.

Step 4: Ignore the tutorial and start adding random colors.

Does it look like a stream of magic? No. Did I follow the tutorial? Also no. But I did end up with kind of a cool swirled thing.

That's it for Thingadailies! Join me next year!

Tip of the day:

Switch the pen mode to get different effects. Dodge is a fun one.

(Just added the tags and it turns out the "Not following directions" was a tag that already existed. Excellent branding, T!)

Day 18: Rock On!

Welcome to day 18 of Thingadailies. Want to play along? The full video is here.

Today's starting point: 17:14

Ending point: 18:27

It's a stormy Sunday and it turns out that I've just about reached the limit of my ability to follow directions. (Hey, it lasted 17 days longer than I thought it would, so I'm feeling pretty good about it.)

Here's where we started today:

Step 1: Time to rock!

Bring in the rock2 image. Then squish the bottom rocks, flip it around, warp the top rock a bit, and place it so it all looks like steps over on the right side of the image.

And we get to this:

Step 2: Make the rock look like it belongs in this picture

As always, we start out by adjusting the levels so it's all darker, then setting up a mask to allow the lighter areas where the sun would be hitting the steps to come through.

And here's where I went off script. He adjusted the color balance and kept the rocks gray, like so:

But I liked it better with a hint of green, so I did that instead:

His look more like steps than mine do, so maybe that was a better idea. I don't know.

Step 3: Add a clump of flowers. Or not.

At this point, the tutorial adds a clump of flowers next to the left side of the bridge. I was already frowning at it and considering skipping it even before I realized that I had — once again — positioned the left side of the bridge in the wrong place so I didn't have room for that stupid clump of flowers. I'd already moved the stupid bridge once and I don't like the flowers, so I just left them off.

Here's what they looked like on his. There may be some scene composition reason to have them there, but meh.

So there we are at the end of day 18! I think I'll do the last part tomorrow — he does a lot of minor tweaking that I'm not sure I'll be able to replicate, so there's no point in dragging it out.

Tip of the day:

The scale tool works on selections, not just entire layers.