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I can't say as I knew what I was doing with this one! I was screwing around with FDP3/KPT2/Shop3 and came up with a weird image. I wanted to do another letterbox format image (see "NegaDuck: Full Metal Jackets"). So I worked the same image 3 different and weird ways.
Fractal Design Painter 3, Kai's Power Tools 2, Photoshop 3, CorelDraw 5
This was the original thing I came up with. 'Shop
3 is a memory hog, so my KPT2 wouldn't work with it, so I said the heck with
ya, and used FDP. First, I fiddled with the new Fractal Explorer.
Then I did my second-favorite filter, the Glass Lens effect. Then
a Texture Explorer thing that looked like ocean wave caps. Then a little
FDP surface texturing on that, to make the white parts rise off the 2D plane.
Finally, I did two wild conical Gradients: one in the upper right and
one in the lower left. One was Tie Me Up and the other was Tie Me Down.
(Hey, Kai named 'em, not me!)
It was cool, so I saved it.
This should look familiar. It is exactly the same as the Left Side, but I was trying to figure out the FDP distortion filters. There's a round one, a square, a straight line. I still have no clue. But I liked the round ski-goggled sphere thing!
By now, I'd figured out I could make a triptych from
these bizarro things to get my letterbox format image. For the final
part, I decided to use a KPT Vortex Tiling effect. Well, Vortexing
the whole image ended up with a big mishmash of junk. So I just grabbed
one corner of the original, expanded it to full size, and Vortexed that.
Much better!
Now that it looked like a vortexed black hole effect,
I thought it would be nice to have it shaded like an indented cone. I
experimented with painting various friskets on the alpha channel (in 'Shop)
to get the shading effect just right. In the end, though, I just pasted
a semi-transparent shadow over the whole thing. I also highlighted
up the rims a little.
Now that I had a triptych, I thought up a cool name for
it, and decided to have the text plumb in the middle of the whole thing.
To get that cool warpo-distorting effect, I did the text in CorelDraw,
put it on a swooping path, and added a pinching envelope to it. I then
exported the text as a mask to 'Shop 3.
My original idea was to have the letters be like a cut
or tear in the background, and have beams of fantastical bluish light beaming
out of them. I did all kinds of experimentation with KPT's custom
Gradients, and tricky mask painting, and all kinds of effects. But,
even though I used a highly transparent Gradient, it still covered up some
of the cooler parts of the background. So, I ditched the whole idea.
Now I just wanted the text to float over the image, but
be integrated with it. Doing this so it comes out well-balanced is
a PAIN! I captured a Gradient from the image and used that in the Texture
Explorer. I airbrushed in various squiggles of colours from the background.
I copied, I pasted layers, I tried lighting effects.
Finally I figured out the best way to do this type of
thing. I used the text as a mask to copy the background and paste it
in again as a new layer. Then I fooled with the brightness/contrast
to make it stand out. I dodged in some lightness behind the text to
pop it forward (and kill some of that competing busy-ness in the background).
I also dodged and burned some highlights and shadows onto the edges
of the letters. ('Shop 3's Selection:Border is handy for this: you
can select the very edge of whatever you have masked. This makes a
harder edge than inverting the mask and painting outside of it.)
copyright: ©1995 All rights reserved. You may download this image for viewing on your computer. You may NOT print it, upload it anywhere, use it for a commercial or non-commercial illustration or companion piece, place it (or a link to it) on your web page, without requesting and obtaining PRIOR permission from the artist. For contact details, click here.
price list: This image is not currently available as a print. However, if you are interested in obtaining a print, please let me know. It will only print at about 9" wide. For contact details, click here.