Victoria Nece

Wall decals are awesome.

Monday, 07. 28. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I have a solid white wall in my bedroom that’s more than eighteen feet long, and I had the hardest time figuring out how to decorate it. (The fact that most of the walls in my apartment are solid concrete and won’t accept nails definitely doesn’t help.) But I put up some wall decals this weekend and am really pleased with the results:

Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

Shrinkery

Sunday, 07. 13. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I’ve spent much of today playing with a fun technique called “tilt shift” — you can do it with lenses or Photoshop, but either way you get the same effect: normal size objects appear to be miniature models of themselves.

It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950’s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.

This technique works best with photos shot from a high-ish angle, and will give particularly good results with fairly regular subject matter such as buildings and careful landscaping. Also, England. I think it’s the combination of UK architecture and the very green grass there, but the country just seems to lend itself to being converted into tiny model villages.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed, shot from the train from York to Edinburgh:

York, sans scaffold-covered Minster:

A very mini Mini:

And, last but not least, something from the other side of the pond: the lovely Jersey City parking lot.

Okay Paintings

Saturday, 06. 7. 2008  –  Category: Tutorials

New Photoshop Tutorial! Give pictures a convincing “painted” effect. This technique works best with images that have large, clearly defined areas.

The results may not make people think you’re the next da Vinci, but they might make them wonder if you actually got out a canvas and brushes for once. With any luck, your local coffee house will be begging you to hang your work on their walls!

Meet Hector.

Saturday, 05. 31. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

Hector is a cube-frog from IKEA. He is the best!

He’s sort of my large, square mascot. Expect him to make the occasional appearance in future tutorials.

This particular graphic came about while experimenting with mosaic effects. Aside from the photo of Hector, everything’s Photoshop-generated, and this file’s rapidly approaching 30 layers. I even managed to use several filters that normally fall well within the “Tacky Awful Effects” category: Patchwork, Clouds and Motion Blur. Lesson of the day: all in moderation, all in moderation.

Embroidered Text in Photoshop

Friday, 05. 2. 2008  –  Category: Tutorials

New Tutorial! Make text look like it’s been stitched onto fabric. Useful for sports design, sewing/scrapbooking, kids stuff and anything else where you want a handcrafted look.

This tutorial assumes you have working knowledge of basic Photoshop commands. I used CS3; menu commands may be slightly different in older versions.

Get it Straight

Saturday, 04. 19. 2008  –  Category: Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorial: A super-quick trick for straightening out your disoriented images — without the guesswork. All you need is the measure tool.

This is an easy one; no serious experience required — and it should work even in very old versions of Photoshop.

It’s Photoshop Phriday!

Saturday, 04. 5. 2008  –  Category: Graphics, News

This week’s Photoshop Phriday feature on Something Awful was “Reverse Magazines” — take a magazine, find the reverse of the title (i.e. Bad Housekeeping or Illiterate’s Digest), and make a cover for it.

So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:

My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.

Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.