Signature guide

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Signature guide
Topic Started: Jul 5 2008, 08:59 AM (60 Views)
Number One	Jul 5 2008, 08:59 AM Post #1
Administrator Posts: 76 Group: Admins Member #1 Joined: Jun 25, 2008 gender male	This guide is here to show you is how to make a good signature from scratch, without ANY downloaded tools (not even Microsoft Paint). It isn't hard to make some amazing images if you know where to start. I'm making a cat-themed signature, which will be familiar if you roleplay on any WC boards. However, many of the basic techniques can be applied to any style signature. What you need: - www.splashup.com - Any image editor/host that can resize images (I use http://www.online-image-editor.com/index.cfm) - An image of your cat - An image of an environment - Some sort of message you would like to put on the image - A good deal of patience and creativity :-P As an example, I'll start by picking out some images of my own. Try to get them big. Some high quality, FREE images can be found on the Wikimedia Commons site, but I suppose if you don't care about copyright, you can go ahead and use whatever you find on Google. I do, so I source everything I find. :-P My image of a cat- Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Gato_BarraNa_Galicia_3.jpg Author: Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (under GNU) My image of an environment- Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Wide-lightening.jpg Author: Bournemouth (under GNU) My text- “Phoenixclaw / Eye of the storm” Now then, lets create an image. 1. OPEN the images in splashup. To do this, go to www.splashup.com and click “Jump Right In” to start the art program. Then, go to File and open the images you want to use. Your window should look like this: 2. RESIZE the images to fit in the window. The environment should be no more than twice the size of the final siz, so use the Image-Image Resize tool and Crop tool to change the size of the background. Then change the picture of the cat to fit the image. Use the Restrain box when scaling the image to keep it at an accurate scale. After resizing, my images look like this: 3. COMBINE the images into separate layers. Select the entire cat, copy it through the menu, and paste it over the background. Notice how they are in different layers in the Layers toolbar. Place the cat where you will want it, like so: 4. DELETE the excess background of the cat. Yes, you will have to do this manually, unless the background is one solid shade. However, even then, it is still better to just go in select it with the lasso and then erase whatever you don't need. ONLY do this on the cat layer, as it will still leave the environment behind it. 5. CLEAN up the cat image. Use the blur tool, with a very low strength (like 8), and gently go around the edge of the image. This will get rid of sharp edges and help it look more natural. Also use it on any parts of the image that looks pixelated. Then click the magic wand next to the the layer of the cat and add a layer effect. This will make the difference between good images and fantastic ones. I personally like the Drop Shadow effect, so this is what I used, as shown below: 6. FLATTEN the layers. Use the merge down tool to combine the two images into one layer, and then gradually clean up the edges of the cat with the pencil and blur tool. Be VERY careful when doing this, as a single bad blur can mess up the layer effect. You may want to save your image before attempting this. I used the pencil to make the fur look slightly more “fluffy”, as in the following: 7. ENHANCE the image. This is the fun part- making your image shine. We're still not at the text, so don't worry about it yet. Try adding different features to modify your image. I used a blue colorizer to remove the last shades of green. Then, I carefully traced around the eyes with the lasso tool, avoiding the pupils, and colored over then with a shade of teal with a high alpha level. This kept the eye color transparent, leaving the original “depth” of the eyes intact, while changing the eyes to a more interesting color. I finished the eyes off with a blur around the edges, then I brightened up the teeth a bit. Finally, I gently increased the brightness and contrast of the entire image. 8. ADD the text. Using the text tool, add the text wherever you like, then flatten the image. This should be a simple step, but try to make the fonts somewhat original! Nothing is worse than a great image covered up by Times New Roman or some other boring font. I used a gradient on top of the name Phoenixclaw, which gave it an interesting effect. It has some choppy edges, but these will be fixed when we shrink the image to it's final size. Here's what I have so far: 9. DRAW shapes to make the image interesting. This is another fun step. Add shapes to give your image a feeling of depth. Many of the best sigs use transparent shapes to do this, which is simply pasting on a normal shape after increasing the alpha level. I did this with the 7-sided polygons in my sig, but it will work with just about any shape you want (except circles, which completely baffles me. Use a 100-sided polygon if you want a transparent circle). I also created some little border shapes in a separate window and then pasted them into the main image. After pasting the border shape in the bottom right, I simply pasted it again, this time flipping it horizontally and vertically before placing it in the other corner. Then I added some little white corner shapes around the text, which I made by first creating a white square and then covering some of it with a circle, then removing the circle. Finally, I typed in some black X's to create the final border pattern. 10. GIVE it some finishing touches. Flatten it first, then toy with the colorization, brightness and contrast until you think it's perfect. If you want to add a gradient over the whole thing, the time to do it is now. Do NOT resize the image to its final size in Splashup, the resizing tool is unfortunately not very accurate. 11. SAVE the image. Save it as a JPG onto your desktop and set it to maximum image quality (100). It should not take too much space on your desktop, but you want the quality as best as you can. 12. UPLOAD your image into your image editor and resize it to your final sig size. I like 420 width and no more than 200 height. Finally, get the link and post it in your sig. You're done! :-P



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