orb avatar

[Crazy Man Dan]

they come out like this

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y193/D ... /CUDA5.png

Is that the final PhotoShop version? It looks quite good to me.

Paint.NET doesn't have a Gradient tool for blending. There are ways to accomplish this effect, but they take a great deal of work to get to work properly without a Blend tool.

If you'd like, I could make a tutorial on how to get this to work with Paint.NET. I was planning on making one for glass effects anyway, so I could easily adapt it to glass orbs.

[Crazy Man Dan]

That took me a little over an hour to get looking right, but I think it looks pretty good. Is that something like what you were wanting to learn?

I'm not sure exactly how I want to take this tutorial. I think I'm just going to cover the basics of how to get the orb effects (highlights, dark spots, and fades to get it it looking like a round object), and leave the creative stuff on the inside to the individual.

I'll try to get the tutorial uploaded to my site by tomorrow. I hope that helps!

Dan

[Crazy Man Dan]

the inside stuff is justcutting out shaps kinda right? like have the background blut then put orange on top and cut the shape you want out of the orange?

Yeah, pretty much. The way I did it, I drew in the white seperator lines using the Circle tool in outline-only mode. Then I duplicated the main background color and adjusted it via Hue/Saturation to get the second color. Lastly, I used the Magic Wand to select the portions of each color that I wanted to delete.

I think I'll touch on the interior a bit in the tutorial after all. Just the basics, things that can be applied to any interior design.

Again, hopefully by tomorrow I'll have that up.

Dan

[Crazy Man Dan]

The tutorial's up!

http://paintdotnet.12.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=620

[nife bender]

id try to help, but i still dont have the new paint so i havent really tried out the tut yet.

[Crazy Man Dan]

To do the cutouts:

When you have a basic idea of the shape you want, and you've duplicated the color layer and changed the color, draw out the shape with the Line tool or the shape tools. Make sure the lines go all the way to the borders of the image. As an example, I've turned off the background here:

Now switch to the Magic Wand tool. With a line width of 2px, a Tolerance setting of 50% should do just fine. Make sure your still on the bounding layer, and use the Magic Wand to select the top and bottom portions of the image, like this:

Then switch to the color you DON'T want in that portion of the image, and delete the selected pixels. Then, it'll look like this:

Now, you can switch to the Magic Wand tool and the Bounding layer, and click inside the two lines to select the center:

Then switch to the other color layer and delete that selection. Then your shape cutting should be done!

Once you've removed the portions from both the colors, if you wish, you can rearrange them so the layer with the center color is behind the layer with the outside color. That way, you can put text in the center and have it covered up like it is in some of my example avatars.

If you have any more questions, I'll be happy to answer!

Dan

[Crazy Man Dan]

Looks good!

I think, since I've already written it up, I'll put that small tutorial about how I do the insides on the tutorial site as well. Thanks!