shatterstripes

These are some technique notes about the image I posted yesterday. I rattled these out when I posted it to Illustratorworld's forums. Some of these probably apply equally to Photoshop or any digital medium, some of them are Illustrator-specific.

Glow effects: draw a shape, draw a similar shape on another layer behind it, gaussian blur. Some are flat white glows, some are radial gradients done in 'screen' transparency. Cheap and eye-grabbing effect.

The bg is several things layered - yellow-to-red radial gradient, circle with dotted red outline for the burst (I used an 'adjust dashes' script I found to not have to finesse the dash pattern for days), red fill pattern with a fish-eye distort over it to make it more interesting, some opacity-masked colors to knock it back and make it more interesting (big swash of blue, another swash of blue just at the bottom), and finally a big mezzotinted rectangle at about 5% for texture. Layering like this makes for more interesting and subtle backgrounds, but if you're not careful it turns into mud. I almost went with a nearly flat blue bg at one point!

A hell of a lot of the shapes are translucent, so the texture and bg pattern interacts with the non-white stuff. White is pretty much opaque when you're using screen transparency.

If CS3 really does have a lot of speed optimizations, especially in heavy transparancy, I will be so happy. Working on pieces like this still makes me pine for Expression's 'freeze layer' feature: it's like locking the layer, except it also renders it to a bitmap, and uses that for accelerated preview rendering until you unfreeze it again.

It's pretty faithful to my original pencil sketch; I was doing this to play with the glow effect dissected from a really aggressively style-of-the-day piece someone was asking 'how'd they do that' about, and to try to kickstart myself after a couple weeks of no art from being sick.

The burst of stuff around the head was me thinking 1970s English sci-fi art. It started as a parody of what I'd dissected out of Peter Elson's spaceships, and after I drew it, I realized it also owed a lot to some of the variants of Roger Dean's owl-face logo for Psygnosis in the 90s. This is probably why it ended up blue.