Keith Lord - Online Portfolio

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.

This tutorial will explain how I achieve the effects used in my stained glass window work. This tutorial is very simple, when creating work I spend a lot more time tweaking the settings and filters until it looks right to me, but this is the basic steps I take:

Step 1

Usually I sketch out the design I want in Photoshop, but in this case we are using a simple cross shape, so I skip the sketching and move to creating the blocks of colour. Occasionally I use gradients in the colouring of the glass just to keep things interesting, in this case all the colours are gradients.

Create a new layer and block in the shape and colour you want to use.

Step 2

Usually I draw the frame out with vector tools or with custom brushes, in this case the frame is simple. Duplicate the layer you created in step 2, hold ctrl+u and in the Hue/Saturation screen shift the Darkness/Lightness slider all the way to dark, the layer should be black.

Step 3

Using the Marquee tool, cut away the black layer to form the frame.

Step 4

Now for the textures, I keep a texture file and custom made texture brushes for these kind of things, but you can search google.com for textures. I find that rock like textures are best, if you copy them to a new canvas in photoshop, press ctrl+u and open the Hue/Saturation box, slide the Saturation all the way to the left (making the image greyscale). Now you may need to go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast and tinker with the settings to boost the detail of the texture. Once this has been done, we will make it a brush by going to Edit -> Define Brush. Save the brush and select the paint tool and the brush we just created, and select the colour white.

Now on a new layer in our window file, paint the texture over the window. Duplicate this layer and invert it (ctrl+i) then we need to flip it by going to Edit -> Transform -> Flip Horizontally.
We should now have 2 texture layers one white and one black (make sure the black layer is above the white one).

Step 5

Select the white texture layer, set the layer to Overlay and the opacity to 77%.

Step 6

With the first black texture layer, set the layer style to overlay.

Step 7

Duplicate the black texture layer again, set the layer style to normal, the opacity should be 100%.

Step 8

Select the eraser tool, set the brush to 200 pixels soft edged. Use the [ or ] keys to make the brush bigger or smaller, the brush needs to be able to sit in the middle of a section of window with a gap between it and the frame.
Erase the center of the texture, leaving the area’s around the edge of the frame in tact.
Then adjust the layer opacity to taste.

Step 9

Now back to the frame! First we double click the frame layer and when the blending options come up (you can also click the right mouse button and choose blending options) we choose the Bevel/Emboss option, tweak the settings until you feel the frame looks right (in this tutorial we just used the default).
Next we apply a filter, go to Filters -> Artistic -> Plastic Wrap up the detail and smoothness a little and ok it.

Step 10

This is an optional extra, I have a thing for detail, so I add weld spots to the window as well. To do this I duplicate the frame layer, open the blending options and, keeping Bevel/Emboss on, add Stroke, set to black and 1 pixel wide. Having done that I proceed to erase the layer, keeping the area’s in which the frame joins with another section (or bends sharply) from being erased.

Step 11

Next we tinker with the Contrast of the layer by going to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast and upping the settings to make the welding look brighter and more silvery.

Step 12

Once that is done, we apply a Plastic Wrap filter to the weld layer (Filter -> Artistic -> Plastic Wrap).

Step 13

Now we tweak the opacity of the layer so that it blends with the frame layer yet stands out at the same time, to give the impression the welding is there without it being to obtrusive.
Also added a little lighting effect to the frame layer by going to Filters -> Render -> Lighting Effects. I change the light type to “Omni“, then in the viewer to the left I move the ring of light to where I wanted it to be (in this case it was the center of the window) and clicked ok.

And there we go, as I mentioned I usually spend a lot more time tinkering with the various filters and what not as I am creating a window to get the desired effect.

Here is an example of one of my finished pieces that has had more time put into it, Photoshop is a pretty powerful tool which has some good effects that can be applied to work.