Enlarging bitmaps is not a good idea, but there are ways to quickly fix them and one of those ways is to use the Photoshop filter, Plastic Wrap. It evens out those jagged edjes very well, and can create a nice effect. Here are some examples of bitmaps enlarged by up to 10 times then given a plastic wrap.

Plastic copper texture

Plastic goo

Shrink wrapped artwork

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A quick few samples showing how shapes created in a vector package can be used creatively in Photoshop. This is not a proper tutorial, but samples just for inspiration.

Basic design created in Flash but any old vector package will do. (tip: Flash is good at this kind of thing)

Filled it in with some basic shades.

Made the lines white for a white background.

Now in Photoshop, I have cut the various shapes out, and layered them, giving some drop shadows, inner shadows and texture for interest.

Tried a warp. This just makes anything look trendy.

Some texture. Not sure about this but it can be used with further messin’ about.

Added a background gradient.

More colour! I can now see that some of the cut-out edges need refining, but you get the idea.

Try it yourself. Mess about with some basic shapes and see what you can come up with. They can then become elements in later designs.

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In this tutorial we are going to look at how to cerate a plastic, glossy, glassy look for your text in Flash. I am using Flash CS3 and also using some of the Flash filter effects.

1.

Write what ever text you want to make plastic. In this tutorial we are using the word, plastic.

2.

Break up the word by pressing CTRL+B a couple of times. The give the text a white border line using the Ink Bottle Tool (S).

Make the border quite thick. In this example it is 3 pixels.

3.

Draw a transparent oval, a little wider than the text, and place it a little down from the top of the text.

4.

Using the oval as a guide, fill the bottom half of the text with a linear gradient fill, darker at the top. Do the same for the top half but use a slightly lighter gradient fill.

5.

Create a background for your text. The one used here is a rectangle with a four stage, radial gradient fill. Mess about with it until you are happy.

Place the text over it. We need the background for the plastic effect to truly shine.

6.

Select the text and press F8. This will open a dialogue box. Here select Movie Clip and give it a name.

In Filters, next to the Properties tab at the bottom, press the Add Filter “+” button and select Gradient Bevel. Here you will need to mess around a bit until you are happy but in this example, I used Blur 3, Angle 45, Strength 100%, Distance 3 and Type Full.

7.

Now add the Adjust Color filter. Again you will have to mess around. I changed the Hue, then increased the Saturation to 93 and the Brightness to 37.

8.

For the cherry on the cake, create a little circle with a radial fill of 100% white to 0% white. Remove any border, and place it on the top left of the first character.

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In this tutorial we will be looking at how to create a paper curl in Flash. We will also be adding some texture to the paper using a bitmap.

1. Draw a rectangle the size you want the paper to be. Make a copy of it and put that aside for use later.
2. Create two large circles within the rectangle that block off the corner to be curled.
3. Remove the corner up to the circles, then draw a straight line from the most south-easterly point of one circle to the most south-easterly point of the other. This should create a diagonal line.
4. Remove the circles but leave the triangular point where the circles met and are based at the diagonal line. This is the curl.
5. Create a gradient fill from light silver to white, and make it 50% transparent. Fill the main body of the paper with this, the silver at the bottom. Do the same for the curl but make it a darker gradient, still at 50% transparency.
6. Group this image (CTRL+G) and duplicated it (CTRL+D). Put a copy aside for now. You need to find a photo of some paper. Place this paper behind the semi-transparent image you have duplicated.
7. Double click the duplicated paper curl and remove the fill from the body and the curl.
8. Select the paper photo. Using CTRL+B, break it up, then select the paper curl, and break that up too using CTRL+B. Then deselect all and select the paper photo outside the paper curl. Delete it. You should be left with a paper photo the same shape as the paper curl.
9. Delete the duplicated paper curl, and you should just have a paper photo shape left.
10. Back to the original paper curl you duplicated earlier.
11. Take the paper curl and place it on top of the paper photo shape of the paper curl. You should now have a paper curl with some nice texture.
12. Lighten the lines of the shape and also remove the diagonal line under the curl.
13. We want to give the paper a drop shadow. To do this, take the copy of the original rectangle you created to start with, and fill it with black at 50% transparency. Remove the outline.
14. Mark on the shadow where the curl begins on the paper, then push the point where the curl is, inwards a little. This is where the shadow is warped by the curl.
15. Now make the two new diagonal line slightly rounded outwards.
16. Select the entire shadow. Modify > Shape > Soften Fill Edges to create a slight blurring of the shadow. Use 10 distance and steps.
17. Place the paper curl on top of the shadow, and shift it north-west a bit.

Thats it!

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This is a tutorial on taking a sketch and creating a flash vector illustration with it. The subject in this case will be the American president, Barack Obama.

1. Create your illustration. As you can see I did a quick illustration basing the image on the following data should you be interested: 1.    Thin body 2.    Chunky eyebrows 3.    Eyes close set 4.    Long chin 5.    Pronounced ears
2. Scan in the image. I photographed it, as my scanner is broken, but that works just as well. Using Photoshop, or Gimp increase the contrast of the image so that you have well defined lines.
3. Open up flash and import or paste the image to the stage. Resize it so that it fits nicely on the stage. Not too small though.
4. Now right click on frame two of the scene and select Insert Blank Keyframe. The stage should go blank as you are now on the second frame.
5. Click on the Onion Skin button. This is on the bar just under the list of layers. You will see that the whole page becomes semi-transparent, and you can see the illustration from layer one. You can see why the image needed a lot of contrast. Using the onion skin system we can now trace the illustration using the Line Tool and Pencil Tool.
6. Using the line tool, create a straight line from one point of a round object to another, then pull the shape of the straight line so that it fits the rounded shape. Keep doing this throughout the illustration until you have a complete version of the illustration as a vector line drawing. You can also use the Pencil Tool to doo some freehand tracing too.
7. Once you have done all the line work you should end up with a simple vector illustration of Barack Obama, or at least one that looks more like him that mine does!
8. Turn off the Onion Skin. Now we have the outline for the colouring. Fill in the various sections with a basic flat colour such as a light brown for the skin, blue for the jacket etc. Just leave the eyes for now. We will get to them later.
9. To add depth to the image we need to do some highlighting and shading. To do so, select the skin one and in the color panel make the tone just slightly darker. Then using the Lasso Tool imagine a light from the top left casting a shadow on the right side of his face. Trace this area with the Lasso Tool. Deselect any areas that are not skin and not in shadow, then colour the selected area with the new darker skin tone.
10. Now do the same for all the areas of colour, picking out shadows and colouring them with a darker shade.
11. Now do the opposite and highlight the areas with the Lasso Tool that are facing the light and fill them with a lighter tone of what ever colour they are.
12. The following is how to make the eyes. Just make one then copy and paste another. Select the entire character then press CTRL+G to group it. Do the same to each eye and place them behind the Obama character, resizing the eyes to fit.
13. Nearly done. The only choice now is how to finish it off. There are many ways but here are two: 1.    Remove all the lines, leaving a coloured vector graphic of Obama defined by shadows and highlights. 2.    Give him a thick black outline and perhaps a drop shadow. That’s it!

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I sell pop art paintings that I do in my spare time and although the site generates a healthy number of sales, or at least enough to keep my busy, I have found that putting ads and affiliate links on the site has not hurt my pop art sales and at the same time generates a little extra income.

I currently use allposters.com as they can provide for the UK, Europe and USA. Many people who are looking for artwork and designs will come across artist’s and designer’s websites even though they may have just been looking for something to put on the wall, or a gift for someone.

So far I am quite pleased with allposters.com, not due to the sales as it is too early to tell how good it is, but due to the easy of setting it up. Creating an account was simple. After that, you are given a whole host of options, from banners you can place on your site, to search boxes and even a mini store on your website.

I will get back to you on the sales point when I have given it more time.

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Blending two images using stripes can be a rather cool way of blending images. The achieve the above image follow the steps laid out below. This tutorial is for Photoshop.

1. Get two images. I have used Superman and Spiderman.

2. Create a new layer for image 1. In this case, Superman and create a gradient fill from top to bottom, from back to white using the Gradient tool set to Linear Gradient.

3. Filter > Distort > Wave. Set Generators to 999. Wavelength Min and Max to 4. Scale 100%. Type: Square. Repeat Edge Pixels. You should get the following:

4. Now set the Layer Style Blend Mode… Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options. Set Blend Mode to Multiply.

5. Using the Magic Wand Tool with settings Tolerance 1, no Anti-aliased and no Contiguous, select one of the black stripes. This should select all the black stripes.

6. Now Shift+Ctrl+i to invert the selection and press Shift+Ctrl+c to copy the image. This should copy everything other than the black stripes.

7. Now paste it over the Spiderman image!

Finished.

As a bonus feature, you might want to save the stripes mask as it is very useful to have around for other images.

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Now this depends, is what I say. This particular site had already been created all in flash. They sell gifts online and the site is basically an e-commerce store. They had been up and running for about a year and where getting little or no organic hits to the site. The site was 1 page, with a clever bit of flash running the catalogue of products.

If you know anything about SEO you will know that 1 page with only flash on it is going to be a drop in the ocean to search engines. It is virtually invisible. I rather upset the person by telling them to scrap the site and start again with HTML. I even felt sorry for them and offered to help at a much reduced price.

By all means include some flash where needed or to add style to a page but as an e-commerce site that needs to generate organic search results, it has to be HTML from top to bottom.

Search engines just can not read Flash or at the least, they read HTML much better. Flash is best when used to add to a page, or when it is simply the best solution to a problem. You should look upon flash as an image in the same way you use JPGs or GIFs.

If you are not bothered about search engine traffic, and you just want a pretty site as perhaps a demo for some product, or a gallery of your paintings, then a Flash site is fine.

The moral is; if you want hits, use HTML; if you want to show off, use Flash. If you are clever you can achieve both with a balanced combination of the two.

Just starting out? Go HTML until you know more.

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This tutorial is meant as a simple way to make stripes in Photoshop. It assumes a basic understanding of Photoshop. Included are various samples of stripes at the bottom of the tutorial, for your use subject to the free (cc) licence.

1. Start with a 200 x 200 pixel box.

2. Set foreground colour to Black and background to white.

3. Using the gradient tool set to Reflected Gradient, drag a gradient from the middle of the image to the top. Use the shift key to get it straight. (For special effects, try an oblique or angled gradient)

4. Got to Filter > Distort > Wave.

5. Set Generators to 999. Wavelength Min and Max to 5. Scale 100%. Type: triangle. Repeat Edge Pixels.

Now you should have nice web 2.0 stripes read to use. You can of course use other colours.

If you wish to have stripes without the gradient do steps 1 and 2 again then:

3. Using the gradient tool set to Linea Gradient, drag a gradient from the bottom of the image to the top. Use the shift key to get it straight.

4. Got to Filter > Distort > Wave.

5. Set Generators to 999. Wavelength Min and Max to 5. Scale 100%. Type: square. Repeat Edge Pixels.

This should give you plain stripes that you can then add to your patterns, Edit > Define Pattern.

Mess around with the settings to create some nice effects!

Gradient Patterns

Gradient 2.0 Stripes.

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