I don’t use many Photoshop filters, turns out most are total crap. Try the art effects, they are shockingly bad, nothing like what I would expect anyway. Rant over, I’m using Photoshop cs5 to get this oil painting effect, but its so simple you could do it with any version.

You don’t need any fancy filters (apart from sharpen), no graphics tablet, and to be honest very little skill to achieve good results from your photo. I’m sure there are third party filters that would get you close to this oil painting effect but I’m not using them here.

My oil painting technique

First off you need a good photo, the higher the resolution the better. This won’t work so well with a tiny 72dpi image, so get a good hires photo to start with. It’s also best, if you have your subject in the middle of the frame, looking at the camera. You could do this oil painting with any subject matter, but for this tutorial we’ll keep it simple.

Watch the time lapse video of me working, the oil painting technique is very easy. The basic premise is that we are brushing over the top of the original image with the smudge tool. Its all in the brush work or in this case the mouse work – and goes something like this.

1. Pick a big art brush (fan brush is good)
2. Select the smudge tool
3. Duplicate your photo layer
4. Follow the contour of the face and smudge very roughly at first
5. Use long flowing brush marks (the aim is to smudge everything, eventually)
6. After you have smudged each area, like the ear, flatten with the layer below
7. Adjust the Strength of the smudge tool to get different effects.
8. Duplicate the layer and smudge again

Oil painting in Photoshop tips

Change your paint brush, and brush size often, so the brush marks are not all the same. The eye for instance will need a smaller brush, the forehead a bigger brush.

The fan brush is good for blending. I’ve used it to blend the edge of the person to the background, to give that blurry, misty painting technique.

Push the paint around from dark areas to lighter areas and vice versa. Use long and short brush strokes. Don’t worry if you make a mistake, just undo or smudge the paint over the mistake.

Change the strength of the smudge tool, 80% is good for strong bold brush marks, 40% is good to blend the paint rather than smudge it. Less than 40% produces very delicate results a bit like the blur tool.

You could use blur filter to blur the edge of the figure, so it looks a bit more dreamlike. Be carefull not to over do it.

Sharpen the image to get realistic brush strokes

Once you have finished your smudge painting, you need to sharpen your image to reveal the brush marks. This really brings the painting to life, it makes it pop, and looks like real brush strokes – it goes something like this.

A close up of the brush work, as you can see the sharpen effect really brings out the brush work. It gives it depth so it looks a bit like thick strokes of paint.

1. Duplicate your paint layer
2. Use filter/smart sharpen
3. Set Amount to 500% and radius of 1.8 (depending on your photo resolution, adjust)
4. Look good? now knock back the opacity a bit.

Optionally add a texture layer

Finally I’ve added a kind of paint overlay to my whole image and knocked it back. I just wanted some extra texture in the background to give it a kind of aged look. You don’t need this, but I liked it.

This oil painting technique might sound complicated but trust me its really, really easy to do.

Thanks for popping by.

Before Photoshop

After the oil painting effect

The post How to make a photo look like an oil painting in photoshop appeared first on Itsmesimon.

Trouble was, I had to keep waiting for the tube to stop, then quickly draw the curves before it shuffled back into action. I had enough elbow room, so I could draw the straight lines when the tube was moving reasonably easy. Got a few funny looks from the other commuters. Even if you get a seat on the tube, its still a bone shaking ride, something that I don’t normally mind, as it sends me off to sleep.

A stitch in time

So this font kind of looks like hand stitching, hence the name. I’ve not had chance to see if there are any other fonts with the same name, but I’m sure there must be tons of fonts like this. Rather than do a perfect job, I was looking to achieve imperfection (is that a word?) a shaky look and feel, rather than a perfect dashed line. That’s why I did it on the tube, the only problem is, it made me feel travel sick. I stuck at it, glad I did.

In total there are 190 glyphs, stichedup has uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, symbols and other marks.

Stitchedup best used as a headline font

Stichedup is best used as a headline typeface. As the dashes are so thin, it looks best at bigger sizes, it looses its dashes if you try and use it too small. From my tests below I would say use it at 60pt upwards.

As for how or what you would use it for, well that’s up to you. I would say the obvious usage would be for sewing, stitching and needlework kind of designs. Mind you that might limit it, it kind of looks quite fun and friendly so it could be used for a load of other designs.

Stitchedup usage

Feel free to download and use in your personal work, if you use the typeface I would appreciate a link back or a tweet.

Thanks for popping by.

Download Stitchedup below

You can download the free or commercial version, choose below.

• Stitched up commercial licence – $1.50
• Stitched up free personal licence – $0.00

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The post Stitchedup another free handdrawn typeface appeared first on Itsmesimon.

Game of Thrones

I’m a crazy fan of Game of Thrones, so I thought I would try and make a cinemagraph out of them. Finding the right source material is a bit tricky, but I think I’ve done an okay job – not perfect, but okay.

The problem is finding a clip with a static camera shot and not too much movement from the subject matter, then you it needs to loop well. Its the looping part that is the most difficult as things tend to shift about quite a lot. I’ve created these in Photoshop as animated gifs. I just found the area that I wanted to move and masked out the rest so that is stays still or static. They are fairly easy to create, but I must admit you would get much better results if you take the footage yourself, with this technique in mind. That way you can stage it better.

So here they are my attempt at a cinemagraph, featuring Rob Stark, Ned Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Robert Baratheon and Daenerys Targaryen,

Rob Stark

Ned Stark

Flags in the wind

Tyrion Lannister

Robert Baratheon

Tyrion & Bron

Daenerys Targaryen meeting

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I’ve wanted to create my own handwriting font for ages. The thought of scanning a hundred plus characters gave me nightmares.

Good news then if you own an ipad. If you have an ipad, you can create your own font in about 5 minutes. Shut up! 5 minutes are you mental? Yes, I mean no, I’m not mental, you can create a font with all the basic glyphs in 5 minutes. Its so easy your mum could do it!

How to create a your handwriting font?

All you need is the iFontMaker app and your finger, or pen. I have a cheap griffin ipad pen, so that’s what I use. Before you dive in let me remind you again how you would create the font the traditional way:

• Print a character template
• Draw each glyph with a pen or pencil
• Scan each letter
• Process each Glyph in photoshop or illustrator
• Convert to font with fontlab studio or other package
• Sort out the spacing
• Sort out the kerning
• Generate the font

Obviously, if you had a drawing tablet, you could draw them directly into fontlab or other software package. As you can see its probably too complex for your average user, and you need a whole load of expensive software.

Create your handwritten font the easy way

First, you will need the app. After you install the app, watch the video’s on the creators website. It will quickly get you up to speed on how everything works.

Alternatively, if you are like me, ignore all the instructions and just dive in and start drawing. The app is very intuitive and works like all the other apps you have already used i.e. drag, drop, rotate etc.

Lets get started.

1. Create a new document

The iFontMaker interface. Start by creating a new document.

2. Give your font a title and author name

It will use the title and author name when you publish your font, so make the title your font name i.e. simons hand

3. Use a example font as a template

Kind of like tracing, or a guide, this helps you to keep your font consistent in terms of scale etc.

4. Start drawing your glyphs

You can draw as pen, pencil, brush and vectors, and you can change the width (radius) of each stroke. Its really easy to undo if you make a mistake.

5. Scale and modify if you need to

You can easily select a brush stroke, scale and rotate it or delete it.

6. Build font via 2TTF.com

7. Email the font to yourself, or go via website

To get your font, you need to visit the website and use the pin provided. On the site you can also modify the name and some aspects of the font like spacing. You can also publish it on the site and make it available for everyone to use – yea!

8. You are done, now you can install the font on your desktop.

Conclusion

How easy was that? I’ve never found an app on the ipad that I would use more than once, but this, I’m gonna create a whole bunch of typefaces with it. If you want more inspiration to create your own font, take a look at before breakfast, a free font I created using this app. Granted it took me 10 mins not five, but still dam quick!

The post Create your own font in less than 5 minutes appeared first on Itsmesimon.

So I challenged myself to create a font in under 10 minutes and this is the result. I really like the app, its so easy to use and its dam quick. Obviously I only designed the major characters, numbers and punctuation – I could have done all the glyphs but not in under ten mins. Once you design the font on the ipad, you simply press an upload button and the conversion is done, you can then email the download link to yourself and install on your desktop.

Using the app has saved my so much time, you imagine how long drawing and scanning then converting and spacing all the characters would take. It takes a long time!.

Before Breakfast

Apart from the hand drawn look, it was drawn right out of my head, its nothing like my own handwriting I just thought I would add a few slab bits to make it look more interesting. I’ve kind of styled this like a slab font, so I guess you would describe it as hand drawn slab? I wanted it to look a bit peculiar or have a few unexpected traits, trouble with that is if you go too crazy it looks rubbish.

The font name?

I’ve broken away with the tradition of naming after radiohead lyric. I’ve decided to call this font before breakfast, because I designed it before I had breakfast (I’m quite simple that way!). I never did cook the full English breakfast that you can see in the example images. I had egg on toast! Incidentally ff you’ve not tried a full English breakfast I would highly recommend that you do. Its amazing but only for a treat every now and then as it contains about one million calories and a pound of fat.

How to Download

I’ve decided not to make you pay with a tweet for this font as people complained so much, and just generally moaned about it. So you can download right on the site below, if you do decide to use, I would appreciate a link back to here or if you wanted to a tweet! Enjoy.

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