Effects or technique help

[chevy454]

Anyone know the effects/technique used to create the attached image?  

[Pixey]

Hi Chevy and Welcome to the Forum.

 

One way would be:

 

1.  Paint or get an image like splats or leaves

2.  Use Shape 3D to get it rounded

3.  Use Dents on the shape

4.  On a new layer with the line/curve tool draw your lines and erase at the joints.

5.  Use Shape 3D on the lines Half Sphere Map

 

 

Good luck .

[chevy454]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot!

[MJW]

For the tapering the curves, you could follow ProloficDesign's method of overdrawing the ends with a white curve, if on a white background, or with a transparent curve, if on a transparent background. The second is a little trickier. You need to make the Primary Color's opacity 0, then set the curve blend-mode to Overwrite.

 

For drawing the color patches, you might try MadJik's Splashes and and pyrochild's Splatter, probably followed by Dents. Then followed by Shape3D as Pixey suggests. (You'll probably want to turn of lighting in Shape3D.)

 

 

[chevy454]

The lines I've kind of got my mind around, it was the color "splotches" that were holding me up; I started with the splatter early this morning and just wasn't happy, but I didn't try the splashes and/or dents so I'll go that direction and see what happens.

[MJW]

Another to try is TR's Custom Random Filler. Using it will be a bit more complicated, but it may work well. You'll need to make what amounts to a sprite sheet of splotches (the more, the better, I think). Then make a selection of the region you want to fill, and run the plugin. I think you'd want to set Constrain to Selection.

 

Suggestion on how to generate sprites.

 

Suppose you want to generate an 8x6 sprite sheet of 100x100 pixel sprites.

 

Create a 800x600 canvas.

Draw a 100x100 pixel grid using BoltBait's Render>Grid / Checkerboard plugin. This will be a spacing guide.

Add a new layer for the sprites.

In each 100x100 cell in the top row, draw a splotch in an appropriate color. You could draw an ellipse in each cell with the shape tool, then use Dents to distort them.

Select the top row as a 800x100 rectangular selection and copy it to the clipboard.

Use BoltBait's Fill>From Clipboard to tile the entire canvas.

Use the Rectangle Select tool to select each row, one at a time, and modify the color with Adjustments>Hue/Saturation.

 

Now you have a grid of eight shapes in 6 colors. You can, of course individually modify the cells for more variety. You might originally make the grid of just ellipses, then select each column and apply Dents. Make sure they stay within the grid cells, though. There are plenty of options. The point is to avoid having to make each splotch separately, since you want a lot of shapes and colors.