Tutorials and teaching material

Tutorials, teaching material, practically oriented work examples and information material from the every day freelance life - hot off the Press

Welcome to my monthly appearing column that is determined to supply you with tutorials, teaching material and pracitally oriented work examples of the every day illustration and freelance life. The tutorials are currently only available in the PDF-format but online- versions are already in the making.

I will most likely not be the first person to tell you that three-dimensional typography is experiencing an ever increasing popularity amongst both designers and their audience. An understandable development as the third dimension introduces new elements and uncharted playgrounds into the wonderful world of typography, combining the aspects of design and communication in an unparalleled fashion. While most other articles on 3D-typography employ external 3D-rendering applications, this introduction will guide you through the complete process of recreating the tutorial's cover illustration using Adobe Photoshop and it's built-in tools only. The tutorial comes with the illustration's original, layered .PSD-file, a set of 8 3D-Actions and the original bubble- and smudge- brushes.

Creating A Bubble Brush
Creating / Employing Actions
Illustrating 3D-Typography Using Only Photoshop
Illustrating Vector Swirls
Additional Visual Effects

Whether you want to advertise a mobile application, digital service or wallpaper- package, the involvement of sexy new digital toys is one way of ensuring the attention of your technology-loving audience and us nerds...
This well illustrated tutorial will walk you through the process of creating an iPhone-/ Windows Mobile-hybrid kind of SmartPhone and teach you some of the key-techniques of creating digital device mock ups. The original, layered Photoshop-file is enclosed for your convenience, offering you a chance to retrace the tutorial's steps and reconstruct the original illustration.

Vector Shapes / Pen-Tool
Layer-Masks
Layer-Styles
Dodge- & Burn-Tool
Blur Filter
Overlay-Modes

This tutorial - taking Photoshop and Cinema4D as an example - introduces you to the basic concepts and ideas of merging 2D-vector elements with a 3-dimensional modelling environment. Aimed at all levels of designers, this tutorial walks you through all the steps that are required to recreate the visual style of the cover- illustration and equips you with both valuable techniques and hints on how to take this technqiue to the next level.

Create vector shapes in both a 2D and 3D-environment
Unleash your vectors into the third dimension
Create appealing textures
Create and scatter a custom brush
Modify vectors with layer masks
Use shapes with alternating opacity to create nice effects
Texturize your vectors in 3D

In this tutorial I will let you in on some concepts and approaches that I have employed in my illustration "Chasing The Unreachable" and teach you how to achieve that look. In 12 easy to follow and well-illustrated steps you will learn how to turn a white canvas into a digital illustration and how you can achieve amazing results without actually being able to paint.

Create and colorize a textured background
Create a custom brush-style in Adobe Photoshop
Employ the Smudge-Tool and Displace-Filter
Create and modify custom vector-shapes
Optimize color-curves and alter colors using adjustment layers

More tutorials follow once a month - Web-versions for online-study will follow