Design a pop-up illustration

Pop-up illustrations have always been traditionally reserved for children’s books, although often admired for their tactile and physical qualities. It is now widely accepted for illustrators and designers working across the creative industry to adopt pop-up and 3D techniques to add flair to their visual concepts. Pop-ups can add a sense of playfulness to your work. They can also offer an element of surprise and interaction – and it can be very exciting to open out a pop-up spread and see the artwork spring to life in front of your eyes.In this tutorial you will explore how to combine Photoshop’s tools with traditional pop-up techniques as a starting...

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Inking techniques revealed

When creating comics, few artists stop at the pencil stage – most then pull out the inks for a more dynamic black and white look. Here artist Douglas Sirois takes you step-by-step through how to turn out a piece with a pencil-drawn look. The techniques you’ll learn will get results whether you’ve drawn the original piece in Painter or Photoshop, or scanned in a page of your own comic art, hand-drawn with a 2B pencil.Discover how to combine different line thicknesses to suggest depth, use cross-hatching to add texture and consolidate it with fine detailing to bring some finesse. This tutorial follows up Douglas’ guide to pencil effects in Painter...

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Draw realistic liquids in vector art

Creating convincing liquid effects in vector illustration can be a tricky business. Luckily, Jing Zhang has provided us with this tutorial that shows you how to make a real splash with your art. You’ll learn numerous Illustrator techniques to create vector liquid, by playing around with Illustrator’s Mesh tool, Warp tool and layer blending properties. The Mesh tool is often overlooked, but it is one of Illustrator’s most powerful tools. You can use it to create realistic 3D effects and it allows you to give your work a unique finish.Step 1 Fire up Illustrator and using the Pen tool (P), draw a basic shape of a water splash. Speed up your tracing...

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Organic smoke and spatter effects

It doesn’t take much to make a great looking piece if you have a strong initial concept and some nifty tricks to cover the technical side. In this tutorial Arturas Petkevicius shows you quick and easy techniques ranging from the Warp tool to clipping masks and adjustment layers to create a stunning final image.While the techniques seem simple at first glance they offer many opportunities: you can use them to create a sense of movement in your composition, to create realistic effects and textures, or to add a specific sense of colour to your final composition. Best of all, these techniques are flexible and easy to learn. Arturas has provided a...

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