20% Time 3/3/08

This week, I went back to snowdrip and used two tutorials that I found: one on lightning and one on spheres.  I knew that I wanted to combine them, but I did not really know how.  Then I found a picture on flickr that helped to draw on not only what I am learning, but an old tutorial that I have never posted that creates an object that is like a sort-of plasma ball.  All together it was like some sort of insane factory.  You will see what I mean in a minute.

First, I started off with the flickr picture of a conveyor belt.  I used the burn tool to darken some of the glare that was being reflected all over and decided to leave the people in the background to leave it more realistic looking.

cc “T4 Baggage Claim Conveyor Belt” by markhillary

Then I decided to add the lightning.  I was actually a lot easier than most other tutorials.  Just open a longer-than-usual document and use a vertical gradient.  Then just use the difference cloud filter to create cloudy shapes with a free form squiggly line down the middle.  Use the levels feature to darken the picture and adjust the color hue and saturation.  When you paste the image onto the main one, just switch the blending mode to screen so the black will turn transparent (then I used a mask to take out anything left over).

The next part is the orbs.  This was even easier than the lightning.  Just get a black background, and render a lighting flare.  Then use polar coordinates and set to rectangular.  Then rotate the image 180 degrees, and ‘re-polarize’ it.  Now, all the dark and light areas are in the right places.  Just crop the outer spaces and colorize it.

It is almost complete.  The orb takes a long time, but it is not hard.  Mostly, the effect comes from having a really big brush (the one made out of little shapes) and putting an outer glow and then setting the fill to zero.  Everything else is just circles and inner shadows.  After that, I put the red sphere over the orb and turned down the opacity, and hue/saturation.  Small touch-ups finally finished off the picture.

What Happened?

Apparently, Word-press decided that my previous layout was too cool for them and so had to terminate its use (It was called vistered little).  I just had to reconfigure all my settings and still have not come up with a theme I like.  So far, my header is the only thing I like and I had to create it with filters (I found the tutorial on tutorialized.com for it a while ago.)

So, at first I tried to use moving .gif images, but the RAM on my computer is nearly nonexistent and a few hundred kilobyte .gif took about ten minutes to load.  I then had to choose a regular old .jpg and tune down the amount of post on the screen at a time.  Hopefully, word-press will not take what is left of me.

cc “Bummer…” by Calebdzahnd