Game Art on the Cheap
This weekend I needed to do a few things in Photoshop. Specifically, I wanted to create a few UMLs and touch up some of the artwork in Shade. Since I hadn’t messed around in Photoshop in some time, and also because I have been mostly working on Shade for a while, I took the opportunity to play around a little bit and explore some new ideas. As I’ve said before Photoshop can be a great tool to explore nascent ideas with.
After I was finished playing around I marveled at everything you can accomplish in Photoshop without actually needing artistic ability. I’m so impressed in fact that I thought I’d share a few of my discoveries; read on and impress your friends!
This is the first mock up I created, pretty nifty right? Look complicated and hard to make? It’s not! If you’ve got Photoshop running here’s the run down.
Start by going to Brusheezy and download some brushes which look nice. For instance I used:
Next, create a new document and fill the background black. Then select a cool explosion-looking brush from the aLoud set and a deep purple color. On a new layer, carefully, pick where you think the explosion should go on the screen – you’re job is to compose things!
You’re not making art, you’re composing it.
Once you’ve done that I would tone down things by tweaking the layer’s opacity. I found that something low, say 8%, was the best bet. You should now have a space-like background. If you want to play around with the colors a little more consider adding a new layer with a second effect in, say, a light gray. In fact, in my mock up I combined a gray and purple layer.
Always work on new layers, and frequently take advantage of opacity.
Once I had the background finished I wanted to add some stars. At this point I tend to try out random brushs bundled with Adobe. Some good choices are the wet media brush set and the natural brushes.
Explore the bundled brushes for different textures.
I think there’s a tendency to pick colors at different extremes and I’m going to warn you about that now. As a composer you need to show more common sense! Don’t put white on black, the contrast will be overwhelming. Instead pick for a lighter gray.
Once I had the stars in place I took out the Squared brushset and played around with the different options. At this point I wasn’t sure what I’d be using them for, but I thought they were pretty cool. Pretty quickly I saw that they might be fun as part of a graphical interface.
Play around with different brushes and see what comes up.
Once the idea hit me I remembered Abstract Technical’s text brush which I had used for Forte. At first, the brush wasn’t quite right as there was too much of it. However you shouldn’t let that deter you. It’s almost always easy to tweak things to your needs. In this case I simply used the marquee tool to select and move some of the text around to create a more interesting end result.
Use the marquee tool and the transform tool to make small changes to brushes for much richer results.
Finally, I needed some sort of enemy. Honestly, this is probably the hardest part since the first impulse is to dream up some incredibly detailed and totally impossible model for your enemies. Fortunately, other people have put together some pretty awesome brushes which cover a lot of cases. In my case I needed something sci-fi-y and these anigrams were perfect.
Alright, and there you have it! Or almost anyway. I’m going to save the laser beams for later since this is already pretty involved. Go out and make something pretty!
References
- Brusheezy A site with many brushes and patterns for Photoshop.
- Deviant Art Many user generated brushes and patterns available.
- Psd Tutorials Plenty of tutorials for more advanced techniques.
Related posts:
Hello, my name is Alex Schearer. I grew up in New York and currently live in Seattle. 