#1 The Draft

The draft is probably the most important part of the design process. The way I approach drafting is that the goal is determine the composition, possibly the lighting or color scheme, and to experiment with different design elements.

Here you can see that we’ve established how the piece will be lit, and the composition and color scheme. Another idea that I struck on while making this mock up is that the heroes of the faith should read left to right in chronological order. This way the image seems to be telling some kind of story as you look at it. The common theme of the banner is that these people wouldn’t be heroes if it wasn’t for the work of Christ on the cross, so we have a backdrop that ties all these different people from different time periods together.

Now it’s time to find some source images and hopefully tie this whole thing together.

#2 Blocking

This design is not going to be only original artwork. Had I more time, that probably would have been my goal, but it takes a lot of work to render artwork at the resolution needed for a banner. The next step of this process is to find some nice high resolution source images that we can use to block out the main design elements of the image.

Here is where things begin to come together. We have good starting images for all the major scenes with the exception of Paul on the Damascus road who will have to be drawn in manually. Now we have to sharpen these images up and create a common lighting scheme and color balance for each one.

#3 Tie-In’s

Now that we have all of our elements blocked in, it is time to tie all the pictures together. This requires a little luck, patience, and skill. Watch the next three steps and see these unconnected images begin to mesh.

#4 Finishing Touches

The last stage of the picture is to finalize the three elements that need to be more detailed like Paul, Isaac, and Moses. All of these three characters need to be lighted and detailed so they can look like they “belong” with all the other photorealistic elements. Also some of the lighting doesn’t quite work. For example, the Damascus road looks too bright compared to the other scenes. Also the Isaac altar scene doesn’t blend so well with moses and the ark. Let’s fix these last couple of elements:

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1. Designing a Camp Flyer
2. The Design Process: Drafting

I usually never try to begin a design project by describing what I want to make for the client. This doesn’t really help either of us I think. Instead I try to make a quick, fast, (even hideous) draft to convey two basic things: the idea and composition. That’s it.

This method also has a draw back though in that the draft I make is usually horrible in quality. Even though it is not supposed to indicate the actual final product, most people take it like that and the result is confusion and concern that my product won’t be good.

Take this for example:

This first image was my composition and idea for having a dramatic shot of moses parting the red sea. It’s terrible in quality, but that isn’t my intent. I want the client to be able to say no to the idea without me having to throw hours of work into the toilet.

Now compare the draft to the final product (click to enlarge):

What do you think?

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1. Designing a Camp Banner

Ok I want to show you a step by step tutorial for turning these two images into this:

Ok, so the very first thing we need to do, is mask out the bike and add it to the train image.

The next thing is I very crudely separated the front wheel and added some radial motion blur to make it appear to have some speed and also to add to the effect of the bike being held together by nothing but water.

The next step was to add an appropriate shadow, add a flying driver to add some sense of realism, and lastly I picked a color from the bike and crudely painted over some of the details to help give the liquid a nice red color when we finally add it.

Ok, for the water, I principally used these two images from water balloons popping. The key is to mask them using alpha channels and then paint red underneath them to turn them into a red liquid.

Then just copy and past parts of them over the bike until it is all covered like so:

Next just do the same for the front of the train where it would poke through, and add more water drops until you feel good about it and then you will have the final product:

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After coming up with some original ideas, I finally decided upon the open dossier look. This strongly carries the military theme and it is a natural way to present textual information as part of the design, not on top of it!

1. A military looking map set the scene for the desk.

2. Adding the folder convinced me that the concept would work and I continued to flesh out the design…

3. Textures, lighting, details, and depth are all imperceptible, but vitally important.

4. Adding some room for typography in the most natural way possible…

5. Creating the basis for the week information was difficult, but flowed nicely after some experimentation…

6. All of the details are in place, and now for the finishing touches…

7. The finished product! (Notice how the contrast and saturation are jacked up at the end. This is a good way to make your designs pop)

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Learning this software was fun of itself, but it has also payed unexpected dividends. A few years ago, I received about $150 dollars from a magazine for the rights to use this picture of a tennis ball (shown below) in their publication. This was a very exciting moment for me.

Since then I’ve used photoshop to design websites, re-touch photos, create funny pictures of friends, create flyers, posters, logos, ang banners, and pretty much anything you can think of!

So with that said, I uploaded a gallery of some of my favorite images that I’ve made, so let me know what you think!

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1. Check out GuitarHymnBook.com
2. Visit Godlyguitartabs.com