Recently, I made a logo for someone’s upcoming RPG.

They wanted something kind of corroded looking; if you view the image full size, you can see how the letters look a bit icky and old.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about how I did that. It’s mostly Photoshop tricks and very little hand-drawing.

First, I started with some boring grey letters in their own layer.

Then I added a stock bevel and drop shadow — just standard Photoshop effects. You can click on the fx bottom on the layers palette to add these.

 

I made a generic sort of streaky rusty copper texture like this:

It may look complicated, but it’s mostly stock filters.

On the image above, you can see the results of a Filter->Render->Clouds on top. In the middle, I’ve done Filter->Stylize->Find Edges. And on the bottom, I’ve done a Filter->Stylize->Emboss. And with that, you’re most of the way there.

So I made this great big copper texture and pasted in into my document, and used a clipping mask to make it look like a texture on my beveled letter. You can do that by selecting the texture layer and going to the little arrow menu on the Layers palette and selecting Create Clipping Mask, and what that does is, it uses the opacity of the layer under the selected layer as the opacity of the selected layer itself. But the effects, like the bevel, are still visible.

So at this point there’s a nice color texture, but it needs to look kinda bumpy and worn.

Sadly, I forget how I made this one. 🙁

But it was also pasted into my document, and had Clipping Mask turned on, and I set the Blending Mode on the Layers palette to Hard Light. That makes it so that the colors of the layer underneath are preserved, but you’re sort of adding shading to it. So you can see below how the letter’s still blue-green, but the highlights and shadows in the pitted texture above are coming through.

There’s this sorta lumpy, pitted texture now, but the edges of the letter are still perfectly smooth — it doesn’t look quite right. So I took little bites out of the letter with the Eraser tool, just near the edges, to make it look more like this texture was a three-dimensional thing. This effect is most visible where all the strokes come together in the middle of the letter.

Next, I wanted to add some mineral deposits. Rather than make a custom pattern, I just used this yellowy, lumpy rock pattern that comes with Photoshop.

What I did was, I made a new, empty layer and added a Pattern Fill using that fx menu, and a Color Fill too, to tone down the yellowness a little. And then I just started drawing blobs over my letter.

Part of the goal here was also to hide the flat appearance of the bottom-right part of the K; sometimes, Photoshop’s automatic bevels look a little funny.

That ended up being a little hard to see,and not nearly nasty-looking enough, so I also added a bevel to the mineral layer itself. So it kinda looks like there’s this buildup on the letter.

And finally, I added some more pits, again near the intersection of all the strokes for the letter.

This is a little strange. What you’re seeing below is some beveled dots, but the dots themselves aren’t visible — you can do that by lowering the Fill on your layer in the Layers palette. And what you’ve got then, is the bevel effect applied to the layers underneath the dots.

And there you have it… a lovingly crafted, nasty looking K. 🙂

 

Got outlines for a couple new Scopa cards.

These two characters are going dramatically faster than my previous ones. I’m changing my process a little, and that’s helped.

Here’s what’s different about the process, compared to when I started this project:

• The outlines are monochrome. While my final product will have multi-colored outlines, not having to decide upon and change colors while drawing allows me to just draw line after line, really quickly. The whole process will end up being draw lines -> color inside the lines -> change line colors based on chosen fill colors. It seems kind of counter-intuitive, to change the colors of your outlines as the last step in your process, but I’m certain that doing that after I’ve decided on the fills will result in less indecisiveness and repetitive tweaking of the outline colors.
• There are no fills yet. Again, this lets me just draw lines in rapid succession, and later I’ll draw lots of fills in rapid succession.
• I’m doing two characters at once. If I’m already in outline-tracing or color-filling mode, I can quickly jump into doing the same task on another character, quicker than I could switch to a different task on the same character. You hit kind of a no-mind groove when sticking with a single tool in Illustrator.

So there you have it. All it basically comes down to is batching my work, and doing similar tasks all at once.

I think I figured out a big part of my problem with my Scopa workflow, and working in Illustrator in general: I think of things too much in terms of overlapping shapes.

A lot of the time you can just draw a bunch of shapes, each one on top of the last, and be ok.

Everything’s nice and layered here. But say I wanted to make something with odd overlapping, like this:

I could start with the yellow stick

Add the red stick on top of that

Add the blue stick…

…and this is where things get a bit janky. The blue stick should go under the yellow stick, but over the red stick. There’s no order I can drop these things onto my drawing and get it to work.

The thing is, within Illustrator, I should stop thinking of these as sticks. I’m not working in three dimensions anymore; I’m working in two. I need to flatten everything out in my head, and see everything as flat shapes on a piece of paper.

If one three dimensional object overlaps another, that doesn’t always mean I get to make two 2-dimensional objects in Illustrator that overlap. Sometimes, it means that the top object breaks the bottom object.

What I could do here is draw the blue stick as a couple of separate pieces. When they’re aligned right, you won’t be able to tell that’s what I’ve done.

But there are still overlapping objects here. It’s not a big issue with this simple a drawing, but for more complicated drawings, having too many overlapping objects can be kind of a pain. Selecting things becomes a bit counter-intuitive; I could click on a spot well inside the red stick and get the yellow stick instead because it’s right there under my cursor… just hidden. I do this all the time, and it’s immensely frustrating.

If I’m comfortable with my outlines — and I’d better be, before I move from paper to Illustrator — it might be best to just draw my outlines first

and add in colored, broken shapes everywhere, with nothing overlapping at all.

When I think of ‘layers’ in Illustrator, I think of my object. Like the layers of someone’s costume, layers of fabric.

But a good drawing has a different concept of layers. The drawing itself has layers that are completely unrelated to the layers the viewer might see in the thing being drawn. There are color layers and outline layers and shading layers, things like that.

I think I actually used something like this approach in my Girl Wonder thing, and didn’t quite realize just how good an idea that was until now.