Fire Text Tutorial

In this most recent project in my graphic design class, I was to complete a tutorial on fire text.  I used a great tutorial from psd.tutsplus.com.  To begin my tutorial, I was to download a paper texture from bittbox.com to create the background.  This paper texture can be seen to the lower left.  I created my background by combining this paper layer with a gradient layer.  I then added my text.  In this tutorial I used my name 'ZACH'.  I applied many different glow, gradient, opacity and blur effects to the text.  I used the smudge and burn tools to create the base of my flames on the letters.  I downloaded a flame image from flickr.com.  I used the pen and lasso tool to cut this image into 6 separate pieces of flame.  I continued to use many glow effects to perfect the flames and made them fit perfectly on the letters.  Finally, I created a highlight using a white to black radial gradient on a layer which I lowered the opacity of.  This can be seen in the background of the image, which goes from light to dark.
        This was by far the hardest tutorial I've done this year.  It was not as descriptive as ones i have done in the past and it required me to experiment and ask more questions. Although it was challenging, I learned a lot from this project!

Social Awareness Poster

In my graphic design class, I recently created a social awareness poster against smoking.  I used two tutorials along with a picture taken off of the internet to create my poster.  Here is the original image I took off of the internet...

I felt that this image would be good because the dark background is easy to work with.  I decided to create smoke in photoshop and make text in the smoke using the smoke type tutorial from Abduzeedo.com.  I decided to put the word "poison" in smoke text and put it as if it were coming from the cigarette to illustrate the dangers of smoking.  This was a very tough and time consuming task but I was able to complete it because of the very descriptive tutorial.  To create the smoke text, I applied a blur and a wave to the word poison.  I then created a background with a cloud affect. I erased most of the clouds except for the ones around the word poison.  Finally, I downloaded smoke brushes from Qbrushes.com to add extra smoke to the text.  I ran into trouble downloading the smoke brushes but was able use them with some help from my teacher.

The effect after using smoke text tutorial looked like this...



















After using the smoke brushes and the cloud background, my poster looked like this...

I think that the combination of the smoke texts and the smoke brushes made a cool effect.  The tutorial and the brushes helped to make a very realistic looking smoke effect, while the smoke text added a creative twist.

The final step in creating my social awareness poster was to create a banner with metallic text using the Metal Text Effect tutorial from Photoshopessentials.com.  To create the metal text effect i used many different layers along with the use of the noise, blur, shading, and gradient tools.  I faced a problem when I noticed that the tutorial I was using created a layer that covered my whole document.  With the help of my teacher I was able to figure out how to delete this layer, leaving me just with the metallic banner saying "Don't Poison Yourself".



Here is the final version of my social awareness poster...

I think my idea came out great.  My final product was very similar to the idea I had in my head.  I credit this to the extremely helpful tutorials I picked out and my in creasing skills in photoshop.  I think my social awareness poster came out very well and sends out a great  message!












link to internet image: ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Nick_Oliveri_with_cigarette_2009-01-07.jpg