GoMedia x Ray Frenden Contest!

[heavyprints]

We are currently running a contest so that anyone who participates has a chance to win awesome prizes. We love tutorials, tips, tricks, process threads, and anything of the sort, and we want to reward our members who are contributing awesome information!

The Top Prize will be a Poster collaboration with Ray Frenden himself! This poster will also be shown at the next WMC Fest alongside some of the greatest artists currently in our industry. Top prize winner will also be getting loads of free goodies from the GoMedia Arsenal and T-Shirt mockup sites, along with having their submission published in the GoMediaZine blog!

Second and Third place winners will also be receiving free credit for the Arsenal and T-Shirt Mockups!

All you have to do to be entered into the contest is submit a tutorial, process post, or some type of tip or trick related to Art. We will be picking winners at the end of September, so post early so everyone can see it!

Any questions or comments, feel free to leave a message here. We will update the main post as necessary. Can't wait to see the submissions!

Please post your tutorials in the appropriate forums and just leave a link in the comments here, so that they can be commented on. Thanks!

[GeorgeDaniel]

Very excited about this!

[heavyprints]

I'm glad. Pretty excited myself!

[Quakerninja]

Great idea. Heres one for you. The video was done separate from the text part, so it dosen't match up exactly but all the parts are there. I would say this is an intermediate to advanced lesson but I do cover where to find what you need.




Almost instant pattern brush goodness.

step 1: make some gapless line work in illy with the artistic/calligraphic brushes (these are hiding in the lower left corner flyout menu of the brush panel,) Turn on the pressure, double click the brush tool icon to get the settings feel me. + use the blob brush yo.

Step 2: In the pathfinder panel, use merge. It's the second row, third button in.

Step 3. put down a rectangle of solid white color under the lines, merge again. ungroup, and delete your extras.

Step 4. pick your black lines (y) for magic wand, and lock it down (command number 2), (option+command and number 2) will unlock artwork later on.

Step 5. use shift + click to select the pieces you want to color and with them still selected change the color from the pulldown at the top or the swatches yo.

Step 6. unlock it all and group it.

Step 7. Hiding deep in the graphic styles panel lower left flyout menu there lives the additive liberty with it's bacon flavored live reflect x and live reflect y styles.
Hold Option and click to make a few copies. Tip: To undue this you will find hidden in the appearance panel a list of "transforms" These are not robot's in disguise they are your "copies" Just dump em if you don't want em. So what is going on here, is the copies are instances of the original, any change made to the original will be reflected in the whole grid.
Sounds boring, but you can do so much cool pattern based stuff once you can see what you are doing in real time. Hence live feel me.

Step 8. Shift (e) for the eraser tool hold option for a straight cut, trim to you’re liking.
You are looking to see if there are any odd bits in the pattern, and making it roughly square.
It will need to be square for a later step.

Step 9 object/ expand appearance. (You may also choose to merge again if you wish, it will get rid of those grid lines you see. Those lines will not print so you don't need to fear them but it just makes things clean if that's what you are into mmkay.)

Step 10. make it a square using the width and box at hight the top tool bar, it's on the right L___ H____, it’s ok if it gets skewed a little, just round to the nearest whatever make it a square mmmkay so it it's w: 12.3453332 just a 12 will do and so on.

Step 12 reduce opacity and change to multiply, copy and flip it 90 degrees, use align to selected objects and center it. ( The align tools show up at the top when you select objects) or you can find the align panel under Window/Align.) The one you want is an icon that looks like rectangle cross hairs with a down facing tiny black triangle next to it. Click that and align to key object is the second option. Use this whenever you need to make several objects relate to each other in a nice fashion Vs. align to artboard.

Step12b You can pick the top one and change the colors if you wish, at this point your patten is ready to eat, adding color is just the sauce that makes it taste better.

Step 13 Drag and drop it in your swatches panel

Step 14 pick your blob brush and from the pull down where the stroke is kept, pick your new pattern swatch. If you are having trouble discerning which one it is, use the top corner flyout menu in the swatches panel and make the swatches bigger, or change to list view, and label them. While you are here remember to use the lower left flyout menu to save it for later.

Step 15 doodle and enjoy. cheers.

Just a few more notes:
Why Gray?
1. It's easier to tell things apart.
2. When you add color in illustrator it will swap out gray tones for an equal tone of color.
So dark gray will be dark red and light gray will be light red, or whatever the color is.
3.Lighting is shading backwards, so by switching the darks for light colors you can change the direction the light appears to be coming from.

[lexigeek]

Tossing my hat in the ring for my first post on this forum. Check out this tutorial I did a couple of weeks ago on designing a retro/pulp sci-fi poster in Photoshop: http://adamlevermore.com/2010/08/19/tut ... fi-poster/

Enjoy it!

[heavyprints]

Thanks Newman! If you don't mind, I'm going to make that into its own post tonight so people can comment on it and stuff.

You are totally the first person to post a tutorial for the contest, you rock sir!

[Quakerninja]

Thanks heavy, I've been neglecting this forum, it's about time I give something back.
Go media is actually what got me started in digital design. Before I could even get past the welcome screen in illustrator, I would use the vector packs and submit to the flickr group.

[heavyprints]

lexigeek - That was awesome, thanks for the post!

Newman - stop being a slacker! :P

[nickad]

Great idea for a forum thread! (Hey, I finally broke down and registered for this forum!)

Here's my submission - a process-heavy walk-through of a poster I designed, written for Real Art's blog. Many photos and screenshots from various points of production.

http://blog.realartusa.com/?p=2908

Hope you guys dig, I'm already enjoying the other submissions so far!

[heavyprints]

Thanks for the submissions guys. If you don't mind, lets make posts in the appropriate forum and just put a link to the post here, so that people can comment and discuss the tutorials.

I'll put a note in the main post for it.