Mixing Traditional and Digital Media

One thing that I've started to do recently is trying to mix my traditional paintings with digital artwork. Basically, you scan - or take a photo of - one of your paintings. Then you can import it into Photoshop and incorporate it into one of your digital pieces. You can either use it for something simple like a textured background, or do something really complex.

This is an example of a painting that would make a good background.


And this, I've been working with on-and-off for a while. It uses the watercolors in a much more active way. (Its obviously not done yet.)


Here are some examples of amazing mixed-media works.
Be Smart
Seasick Symphony
Color-Blind

Just Showing Off

I admit it, I love showing off my work, whether its a painting or a website layout, paint or pixels. I did this the past week. Its India ink on Bristol board. Which is not really board. It's more of paper. It was loosely based off of Wu Guanzhong's 'The Banyan Tree'.

Using your Talent

By now you may be getting to the point where you're wondering what you can do with your new-found Photoshop talent. Well, there are always the obvious: doing graphic design work, either for payment, or for your church or baseball league. But you can also use Photohshop to make T-shirts, clocks, and any number of things that you can sell online. If you want to print them yourself, you can use Etsy. Etsy is nice because you get to pick the prices and interact directly with the customers. And it only costs $.20 to post an item. Or you can use a service like CafePress or Zazzle. They allow you to upload your graphics and put them on any of their products. People can then purchase them through the site, and you get a small cut of the profit. And then there are the sites like Threadless and Infectious that pay you a pre-set price for your designs, if they make the cut. But if you don't care about monetary gain, but want to show off your mad skillz, I recommend deviantART.

"Share the Love"

This is a little illustration I've made for a contest Infectious is having. The goal was to create an image to be used on a laptop cover that had to do with blogging. Hope you can tell what I was trying to get at with it.

Hiatus

I'll be taking a little break from this blog for a week or two. But don't fret, I've found lots of links to good tutorials and other interesting things to keep you occupied while I'm gone. Be sure to check them out.

w3schools has lots of good tutorials, resources, references, and examples. It can teach you anything about HTML, CSS, Javascript, and much more. This will help a lot if you're into Dreamweaver.

N.DESIGN studio has lots of good tutorials and resources for you Illustrator users.

And you can always find good tutorials on DeviantArt.

Simple Patterns

This is more of a suggestion or idea then a tutorial. It basically just demonstrates what all you can do with a simple filter.



Watch Simple Patterns Tutorial  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Photo-Merge

This is a really simple, but really helpful tutorial. Ever take panoramic shots and then have to go through each one and try to find where they match up? Well, with CS3 you don't have to. Just open up as many shots as you want, go to File - Automate - Photomerge and select your settings. If you already have all the images open, you can just select Add Open Files. Then, sit back and watch as Photoshop automatically lines them up to each other, and uses masks to hide the parts that are not needed. Here's an example.

I took these six images. . .


















And, using Photomerge, got this: