I improvised the entire pattern as I went, so this is a bit of a rough how-to, and can be adapted to make robots of all shapes and sizes.

You know that little flash widget thing Google gives devs that generates infinite random robots? It’s like a (much slower) version of that.

To make your own cuddly little robot, you will need:

• Crochet hook: Size K (6.5mm)
• Tapestry needle
• Yarn: 1 skein (170 yards) Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice in Fern or other worsted weight yarn, and a small amount of scrap white yarn
• Stuffing of your choice. I don’t know how much, I just have a giant pillow-size bag of polyester fiberfill I grab by the handful and never seem to run out of.

He’s basically all single crochet, and intentionally a little asymmetrical and off-center, as I wanted to add a bit of softness to a very geometric design (also, not having to count stitches is quite satisfying). This was a quick project – took about two evenings of work. You can make him as big or as small as you like, and you may want to get extra yarn just in case — I used almost exactly one skein.

Step 1: Body

Chain 20, or as many stitches as you’d like his body to be tall. Then work back and forth in single crochet until you’ve made a a tall, skinny rectangle for the body. Keep going until you have a piece long enough to wrap into a cylinder roughly as wide as you’d like his body to be. Mine looked something like this:

Using a tapestry needle, stitch the two short sides of the rectangle (red in the illustration) together to create a tube.

Step 2: Neck and Head

The neck and head are crocheted in the round directly on top of the body tube. It’s essentially a matter of expanding and contracting the circumference of the cylinder.

Neck
Row 1: To create the neck, start with a round of FPsc stitches on the inside of the body’s top edge.

Row 2-3: Work each round in sc, with enough decreases throughout to shrink the circumference a bit. (I think I skipped a stitch every five or so?). If you want a deeper notch for the neck, add a couple more rows here.

Row 4: Work a round of FPsc stitches on top of the previous row.

Row 5-6: Work each round in sc, increasing by the same number you decreased by previously. Continue adding rows until the base of the head will be the same circumference as the body.

Head
If you want a hard edge at the bottom of the head, work the first round in FPsc on top of the neck. For a softer edge, work in sc.

Work each row in sc in the round. I shaped the head by skipping an increasing number of stiches each row as I went, first one for every 15 then one for every ten and so forth, using bigger decrease increments when I wanted to round the head faster. I don’t think I had a precise pattern, but I did end by skipping one for each five, then four, then three and two stiches, until I’d sealed the top of the head. Just do what looks right — you may have to experiment a bit to get it right.

When you get to the top, stitch it closed and pull the yarn tail through to the inside.

Step 3: Appendages

Arms
The arms are basically little sausages. You’ll need to make two of them, unless your robot is a little unusual.

Chain 3 and join. Work 2 sc in each stitch until you have them as wide as you want them, then work 1 sc in each until the arm is about as long as you want it to be.

Stuff it, then decrease back down to seal it off. Pull through the last loop, then leave a long enough yarn tail to sew the arm to the body.

Legs
The legs are similar, but shorter and squatter, and I didn’t sew them shut before I attached them to the body. Make two.

Chain 3 and join. Work 2 sc in each stitch until the leg is a bit wider than the arm tubes.

Crochet one FPsc row on top of the work, then work 1 sc in each st until the leg is as long as you want it to be. You don’t need to decrease like you did the arms — the unattached legs look like little baskets. Pull through the last loop and leave a tail for later.

Antennae
To make an antenna, crochet two rows of SC, fold them in half and slip-stitch the halves together. Make them as long or short as you wish, and leave a little tail yarn.

Step 4: Assembly and Finishing

Attach the arms to the top edge of the body using their tail yarn, one on each side. They should flap around pretty nicely.

Stuff the head and body, then fold the body fabric over on itself at the bottom, tuck in the corners, and sew it shut. This will make your robot a little more rectangular.

Stuff and sew on the legs. On my android, the legs are attached toward the front of the body instead of directly on the bottom — this way, they point slightly forward so I can sit him down.

Attach the antennae. You may want to try pinning them a couple different places before you decide where the best spot is.

Add eyes. I just stitched on some scrap fuzzy white yarn with a tapestry needle, but you could use buttons or even those plastic googly eyes if you’re so inclined.

And that’s about it! I’d love to see anyone else’s attempts.

I usually write Photoshop tutorials, not crochet patterns, so let me know if there’s anything confusing and I’ll try to explain better.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

We’re not going for Great Art here, though, just something that’s a whole lot more artistic-looking than what you get by slapping “Smudge Stick” on a jpg and calling it a night. A sort of happy medium, if you will.

I’m going to show you how to turn this:

Into this:

(Click for big.)

FIRST THINGS FIRST

We need to prep our source material, in this case a slightly-tilted, slightly-washed-out image of the Brooklyn Bridge I snapped from a tour boat. (A perfect cliche image!)

1. Rotate and crop the image to improve composition and make it look a bit less like a casual snapshot. See Get it Straight for a how-to.

2. This photo’s still looking pretty blah and gray, which is no good when we’re aiming for something impressionistic. Add a Levels adjustment layer (or just hit ctrl+L if you aren’t too worried about permanence), and bring the black point up a bit.

3. Tweak the Curves tool (adjustment layer or ctrl+M) to increase the contrast, like so:

4. Bring the saturation up with Hue/Saturation (adjustment layer or ctrl+U):

(Normally, when restoring/retouching a photo, this would be way, way too high — but we’re not exactly going for realism here.)

5. This is the point of no return, so it’s a good idea to save before you begin this step. Select all layers and hit ctrl+E to flatten. If you don’t plan to print your painting, resize your photo to something appropriate for screen resolution — in this case, I’m working at 640×448. Your mileage may vary.

TIME TO START PAINTING

The real key to this effect is the Art History Brush. It allows you to choose a particular step from the history of your image, select a brush and ‘paint’ with your image as a source for both colors and contours.

6. On the History palette, click the box next to the most recent step to set it as the brush source.

7. Choose a brush. Feel free to experiment — the options are virtually endless, and different brush settings can produce anything from soft watercolor effects to wildly colorful impressionistic results. In this case, we’re not going for anything particularly wild, but adding a texture and a tiny bit of hue/saturation/brightness jitter (the Texture and Color Dynamics tabs of the Brushes palette, respectively) helps add realism.

In addition to the approximately eight billion options on the Brushes palette, the Art History Brush asks you to choose a style: Tight Short, Medium and Long tend to be the most useful, but the others can be interesting on occasion. Tight Curl results in something akin to painting with Cheerios.

It’s generally best to start with a reasonably large, loose brush set to Tight Long or Tight Medium, paint in the rough shapes of the image, then go back and add the detail with a smaller brush. Before you begin painting, drop the opacity down a bit to get a more layered effect — I usually set it around 70% or so.

8. Choose a big, fat textury brush and paint away! Just drag loosely around the image — Photoshop will trace contours for you. Paint until you’ve covered the entire image and no photo shows through.

It’s okay if it looks like a big smudge at this point. Since the Art History Brush is still drawing from the history state you selected earlier, you haven’t lost any source information by starting with a large brush.

9. Drop the brush size way down, to around 15 or so, and paint over the areas where you want more detail. For a softer effect, lower the opacity a bit.

10. Choose an even smaller brush (10ish), lower the opacity to around 40% and change the style to either Tight Short or Medium. Paint in the areas where you want even finer detail.

FINISHING TOUCHES

11. Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer to give the image a blue cast.

Create a custom gradient by clicking on the color bar in the dialog box (A). Click the small box with an arrow at the bottom left of the gradient (B). Click to change the color (C), then choose 010006 for the hex code (D). Repeat with 84a7ce for the middle box (if there isn’t already one there, click underneat the bottom of the gradient and Photoshop will create one) and f7e9cf for the box on the right. The final gradient should look like this:

12. To add to the natural media illusion, give the painting some texture. The best choice for this is a full-size image you scanned yourself from an actual piece of canvas or textured paper — nothing computer-generated quite approaches the realism that provides. But if you want to stay well within our “okay” standard, you can use one of the patterns built into Photoshop.

Choose “Pattern Fill” from the adjustment layer menu.

Load the “Artist Surfaces” preset (A), then select the preset called “Canvas” (B). Click ok, then change the layer blend mode to Soft Light.

FINAL RESULTS

That’s it! You’re done! Now go put on some black clothes and drink a chai latte. Well, maybe one from a mix. Save the fancy drinks for your real paintings.

After a fair amount of experimentation, it turns out it’s not that hard to do — but it does take a little tweaking. The final results are surprisingly versatile.

In this tutorial, we’re going to make the this header for a fictitious sewing blog:

GET THE FILES

To follow along, you’re going to need this brush and this layer style. (Right click and choose “Save Link As…”/”Save Target As…” to download.) You can also grab them both together as a 4kb zip file here.

START SEWING

1. Create a new file, 900×500. Fill the background with black.

2. Add the text (T) you want to make look embroidered. Use a really thin font for this — the stitch effect traces the outsides of the letters, and if you use something too bold you’re only going to get embroidered outlines. I’m working with Nobel Light. Make sure there’s enough space between your letters to avoid overlapping piles of thread.

3. Click the text warp button on the Options bar.

Choose “Arc” from the drop-down menu and set the Bend slider to about 19.

(You can skip this and the following step if you just want straight letters.)

4. Hit Ctrl+T, rotate the text a bit and hit enter.

5. With the type layer selected, choose Layer > Type > Create Work Path.

You have now created a path based on the outlines of the text.

6. Select the brush tool and load the brush file you downloaded. Change the size to 8pt or so. Make sure your foreground color is the same as your text color.

7. Create a new layer. (Shift+Ctrl+N)

8. Choose the pen tool (P), then right-click on the image and choose “Stroke Path…”.

Make sure “Brush” is selected and the “Simulate Pressure” box is checked.

Click OK. Yay, fuzzy text!

9. Load the layer style you downloaded, and apply it to the stroke layer (not the type layer).

Select the text layer underneath and make the font color a little lighter.

And there you have it. Shiny embroidered text:

10. Find a home for your fine sewing work, like this blog template:

Keep in mind that the brush preset also works as, well, a brush, and you can also use it to draw embroidered-looking things on its own — for instance, the RSS feed icon in the example. Just be sure to drop the layer style on top for shine.

Happy stitching!

So, I was on a tour boat. Boats + handheld cameras… not an ideal combination:

We need to straighten things out a bit.

1. Grab the Measure Tool (I).

Draw a line along the image’s horizon, like so:

2. Choose Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary…

The rotation value will already be filled in based on the measure tool — all you need to do is click ok, and your image will be nice and straight!

3. Crop (C) the picture to get rid of the rotated edges and improve the composition a bit.

That’s all there is to it! (Well, this picture still needs color correction, but that’s another tutorial…)

And did I mention it’s free? You can download it here.

It’s also really, really intimidating at first glance. It has more than eighty different keyframable parameters, and almost all of them have extremely vague names like “Xform 2 Var 6 bent” or “spatial oversample factor.” It’s also slow to render, sparsely documented and more than happy to crash on a regular basis.

Eep.

So, like, how do you make it… do stuff?

It’s not quite as scary as it looks.

BASIC STEPS

1. Make sure the AEFlame plugin is installed and the presets file is hanging out in your C:/ directory before launching After Effects.

2. Create a new composition.

I’m working in NTSC D1 widescreen 720×486. Create a new comp-size solid — color doesn’t matter.

3. Choose Render -> AEFlame from the Filters menu.

Look, fractals! You may want to work at draft quality and quarter resolution until you’re sure of your design — it helps to cut down on the crashes. (You can set AEFlame itself to draft quality through the Global Commands drop-down menu as well.)

KEY PARAMETERS

4. And now for the secret of AEFlame: one little slider changes everything. I think you’d see this plugin in much wider use if this option was off on its own with a big “USE THIS ONE” label and a friendly red arrow pointing to it. But it’s not. So instead, you need to look for “Parameter Set,” the first option under Global Parameters.

You can put any number you want in here, but it needs to be between 0 and 300 for anything to happen.

Scroll through your options until you get to a good starting point. I’ve picked 242, for argument’s sake. It’s pretty:

5. Choose a set of colors for your fractal by scrolling through the “Colormap #” option (also under Global Parameters). There are 83 to pick from. Number 36 looks good for now.

Adding a couple keyframes to the Colormap Rotation parameter can give you an instant color-shifting background pattern, and is an easy way to create something that’s not too distracting.

ANIMATION

Now that you’ve created a fractal, it’s time to add some motion. There are several different approaches you can take at this point, but all of them require at least a little bit of digging into the Scary Confusing Other Menus that we have heretofore avoided:

…Yikes.

Fortunately, AEFlame has automated the process for us a bit. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, some attempted explanation of what all this actually means:

It’s easiest to think of each Xform as an “influencer” — play with the numbers, and you’ll change the shape of the fractal. We’re going to stick with Xform 0 and Xform 1 for this exercise. (Xform 2 and 3 are disabled by default. You can enable them if you want to experiment, but they tend to slow processing down and you get perfectly good results without them.)

The first two options are Density, which affects how strong an influence each Xform menu has over the fractal as a whole, and Color, which decides how much power that menu has over the color mapping. I tend to leave them alone.

The remaining parameters fall into two categories: vars and coefficients. As best I can figure, there are multiple ways of drawing and distorting a fractal, and the var controls decide how much of each to use. Linear creates straight lines, sinusoidal waves, spherical circles, swirl, well, swirls… you get the idea. The coefficient numbers get added into the mix as multipliers. The fact is, all you really need to know is that fiddling with the numbers will give you different shapes.

So. On we go.

6. You can tweak all 30 or so of these parameters individually, but AEFlame is happy to do it for you! Set keyframes for all the vars and coefficients in Xform 0 and 1, then move a few seconds down the timeline.

7. Choose Insert Keys from the Global Commands menu to automatically create keyframes for every parameter you’re animating.

This saves a surprising amount of time.

8. Use one of the options on the Global Randomize menu to randomize everything at once, or the individual Xform menus to randomize one section at a time. There are lots of different choices, and they vary in intensity. Your fractals can morph into something wildly different, or evolve smoothly and gently. And if you don’t like the result of randomizing, just click it again!

(Choosing “Vector all coeffs forward” (left) tends to produce a nice subtle effect, whereas it’s a pretty good bet that “Randomize All” (right) is going to give you something that looks nothing like what you started with.)

9. Experiment until you get something you like, then adjust the keyframes to control timing — some animations really need ease in/ease out to look natural.

FINE TUNING

10. So now you’ve made a cool shape and have it swirling around in space. Time to add a final bit of polish and make your work smooth and shiny and ready to render.

Before you begin this step, SAVE YOUR WORK. Messing with AEFlame’s quality settings is a good way to crash After Effects, especially when you’re working with high-res files. Experiment with care and try to keep these settings as low as possible.

There are several different ways to adjust the image quality. The simplest method is to choose an option from the Global Commands menu. Do you need to go all the way up to “Ultra High Quality”? Probably not. High is probably enough, and a better compromise between smoothness and render time. (Ultra High could easily be relabeled Ultra Slow.)

If you want to adjust quality manually, there are three sliders in particular that you need to pay attention to, all located next to each other on in the Global Parameters menu. They should seem quite familiar if you’re used to rendering in 3D software:

A) Sample Density. Think of this as an “overall quality” setting — lower values give you grainy results, higher values give you beautiful swirled images but will likely crash your PC. Cranking it all the way up to 200 will give you beautiful, virtually grain-free results, but I find values around 30 still render with reasonable speed and look quite good.

B) Spatial Oversample Factor. This performs a function similar to anti-aliasing, smoothing edges and getting rid of jaggy bits. It’s very processor-intensive, as it essentially requires re-rendering areas multiple times in order to smooth them (someone please correct me if I’ve explained this wrong). You don’t need a large value here — even choosing Ultra High Quality only sets oversampling to 10 out of a possible 20. If the Sample Density slider is set too low, a high oversample value will darken your image.

C) Spatial Filter Radius. This increases the antialiased look by blurring the resulting image. Keep it set low — the default values are around .5, and you won’t need much more.

For comparison’s sake, check out the following (click for big):

Draft Quality (Spatial Oversample: 1, Spatial Filter Radius: 0, Sample Density 1. Render time: less than a second.):

Good Quality (Spatial Oversample: 2, Spatial Filter Radius: 0.5, Sample Density 50. Render time: 13 seconds.):

Ridiculous Quality (Spatial Oversample: 4, Spatial Filter Radius: 0.5, Sample Density 200. Render time: 52 seconds.):

The difference in quality between #2 and #3 just isn’t worth the difference in render time.

MOVING BEYOND AEFLAME

You can stop animating here, render out your fractal sequence and be done for the day. But AEFlame produces even more interesting results when combined with other features of After Effects. (Although it’s a good idea to pre-render the flame layer once you’re satisfied with it. Your subsequent experiments will be faster and less prone to crashing.)

Here are a few things to try to make your flame fractals more unique:

• Composite your AEflame layer over a background — even a simple gradient ramp can be very effective, and choosing various blend modes will allow you to create many different looks from a single fractal.
• Add additional filters. CC Time Blend can do stunning things when given AEFlame as input. The “composite under” setting generates animations with a soft, dreamlike quality. Time Blend can be slow, but it’s a great deal faster than AEFlame at Ultra High Quality. Glow and radial blur also produce some nice effects.
• Create multiple flame layers with different parameter sets, set their blend modes to “add” and composite them in 3D so they swirl around each other.
• Use some basic color correction techniques to make things pop. Levels and Curves are always useful, and duplicating a layer, blurring it slightly then setting it to “Overlay” will give you tons of glowy contrast.
• Write a bit of code. AEFlame handles expressions well. I find I get nice results when I map various parameters to an audio clip. You can do this either by using a plugin like Trapcode SoundKeys or converting your music to keyframes (Animation -> Keyframe Assistant -> Convert Audio to Keyframes) and mapping things to the amplitude. Check out Dan Ebberts’ fantastic guide to expressions at MotionScript.com — he has some helpful tutorials on how to do it. Mapping a waveform to brightness and scale creates a nice pulsing effect.

And, most importantly, play around! You have approximately one meelyun parameters here to experiment with — see what they do! The best things I’ve created with AEFlame started out as complete accidents.

So there you have it. Not SO scary after all, is it? And with so many options at your disposal, you’ll never create the same fractal twice!