Keith Lord - Online Portfolio

During packing in preparation for the move, I had a chance to look over some of my old paintings and sketchbooks. In part this was down to nostalgia but mostly it was down to a problem I have that I have been trying to overcome.

This problem is a big case of being burned out.
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A few months back I was chatting with some fellow friends and the conversation turned from Myst to the book 1984, and I was inspired to do some Big Brother inspired Guild of Maintainer posters.

Yesterday I decided to remake them using the Guild of Maintainers colour of burgundy.
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I’ve been wanting to do a piece on Veovis for a while now, I finally got around to it recently. Veovis is one of those characters of the Myst universe that I like a great deal, not because he ended up killing most of his race, but because of the mechanism that lead to the act. Not to mention that after he had lead to millions dying, he refused to step over that final line and break one of the greatest D’ni laws.
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When it comes to how the Nexus is set out there is not much I don’t like about it, for the most part it is pretty easy to navigate around in. However there is room for improvements in regards to navigation, not only that but hood management and some “issues” that bug many people.
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When Uru Ages Beyond Myst and its online counterpart Uru Live was launched, players starting out found themselves at The Cleft, the “gateway” to D’ni. To those who follow the D’ni Lore this was a place of significant historical value and a place much desired to be visited.
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Previously I mentioned of my interest in Flickrvision. Well I recently discovered Twittervision, same basic principle of Flickrvision but with people’s “tweets”.
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Todays quote come from my dearest.

“what the hell are you doing to my eyes”

Taken out of context one could wonder what on earth she is referring too. She was of course refering to a test image of the new navigation bar I am working on for the MOUL site.
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So we have structured HTML/XHTML, we have structured CSS but it seems like a rarity to find a structured .PSD file.
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Hooray for lame titles.

Interesting day on the Apple front. Was keeping track with the live blogging Engadget was doing of the event.
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This tutorial will explain how to create a simple brush in Photoshop for use in artwork. Just a note this tutorial we be updated with how to group the brushes your created into a single pack for convenience.

Step 1

First we will need the image we want to use for a brush, in this case I used the picture of the Cleft found on CyanWorlds website. I copied the image to a new canvas in Photoshop and cropped the image so it wasn’t to big.

Step 2

Next we grey-scale the image, to do this we hold ctrl+u on the layer the image is on and when the Hue/Saturation box comes up, we shift the Saturation slider to the far left.

Step 3

Now that we have done that, it is now time to define the brush, to do this we go to Edit -> Define Brush.

Step 4

Name the brush to what you want it to be (in this case we named the brush cleft-brush) and click ok.

Step 5

Congratulations the brush has now been created, click the brush tool and then go to the brush selection box and scroll down, there you will find your brush.

Step 6

Well there isn’t really a step 6, the brush is completed and is ready for use.

It is always an idea to keep a back up of your brushes, whether it is in the brush back format (.abr files for Photoshop) or in .jpg format just in case Photoshop resets the brushes. I keep a folder with them in .jpg format myself.

This leads to the last few steps, or sub steps. As you can see in the above image some of the brushes have a grey background to them, this can cause issues when you are using the brush, as the grey background will show up like so;

This easy to fix.

Step 7

Starting with the original image used for the brush (if you no longer have the original image, you can select the brush to fix, set the colour to black and paint it onto a simple white background).

Step 8

Now we alter the contrast to make the grey background white, to do this we go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast. We up the brightness a little so the background becomes white, we then edit the contrast to make the black parts of the brush black (as they may turn grey when increasing the brightness), being mindful not to increase the contrast to much otherwise the edges of the brush become jagged.

Click ok, save the brush again, delete the old one (if there is an old one) and you will be good to go.