Garden Girl Sig Tutorial

[Kouhai]

*After Note: Damn, writing tutorials are hard. haha. A lot of this is messily written. If you have any questions or parts that I need to clear up let me know in a post and I'll answer to the best of my ability.
*Another Note: All resources can be found in the tutorial when you reach the point of needing them.

Hi guys and girls, I finally made a clean signature (LOL), so I thought I could make a tutorial out of it. It's fairly simple, and some parts aren't the best. But here I go!~
 

 

OUTCOME

To start it off: Canvas Size. I did mine 500x220, because that's what I'm comfortable with. You can use whatever size, it shouldn't matter too much. Go with what you're comfortable with.

Blank Canvas

Step 2, Getting your background / stock. For this tutorial you want a stock which has an obvious fore-ground to it. I chose a scene from 'Garden of Words' (Kotonoha no Niwa). This is the stock I used (already re-sized though). You want to resize it, rotate it (if you think it would look better), and place it. This stock is pretty easy in this case since the foreground needs to be vertical, you can't rotate it too much. Just resize + place. This is what mine looked like. *Note: This will be your bottom/base layer.

Stock + Placement

Now that you've put your stock down, you're pretty much done with the background. Easy, right? The next thing you have to do is render the fore-ground part of your stock, in this case it's the pole + leaves. I'm not the best at rendering (I'm pretty terrible), but it shouldn't matter too much. It's not the focal point of your signature. This is what my render looked like. *Note: I didn't render the right side of the pole because I knew I wouldn't place my render there anyway. It would be better to render it completely, but I'm lazy, and as I said, not the best at rendering.

Pole Render

So you've got the background / foreground separated now. Time to do the in-between. That's the character render. Pick out your render. I had a garden/park scene, so I picked a render I thought would fit it. Resize it, rotate it (if you like), and then place it where you want. This is the render I chose + where I placed it. This layer is in between the BG and the FG.

Character Render + Placement: <Warning, Pantsu Shot>

It's starting to come together already! The colours seem a bit mismatched though, so to match them a bit more I placed a copy of my render over the entirety of the background/foreground. I did this twice, Gaussian blurred one on Overlay (56% Opacity) and motion blurred the other on Normal (5% Opacity). Once I had these two layers, I duplicated them again. And I used two for the FG, and two for the BG. I used a clipping mask so it would only effect the background and foreground, and not the render itself. To do that, alt+click in between the adjusting layer, and the layer you want to apply the changes to in the layers section. (So starting from the top, the order of youre layers are: Adj1+Ad2+Foreground -> Character Render -> Adj1+Adj2+Background)

BG/FG Colour Adjust

I want to add in more lighting now, to make the signature more scenic. As you can see by the render, the light is going this way. Lighter-->Darker. So you want the light source coming in from the left side of the signature. I used a soft-rounded brush to put white in over the upper left, and gradually eased up as I reached the middle-bottom of the signature. Once I had the foundations of it set, I motion-blurred (Angle 53: Distance: 287) the light source. I then put it on overlay (77% Opacity). This layer will be on-top of all the other layers.

Lighting

We have a light source now, yay. It looks a too bland for my personal preferences, so I want to add a little more depth to the character herself. Duplicate the character render directly on top of herself, and Gaussian blur it. (~5) It made the white parts too bright, so you want to render it out so you only have the hair left. Set the layer on hard light (100% Opacity). It gives it a nice, soft feeling to it. Fun to look at.

Hair Adj

Again, the lighting needs a bit more work. Or rather, the shadows. She's underneath cover, but there is no shadow over her, so it looks a little funny. Just use a soft-rounded brush to brush in some black where you think the shadows will be, and set the layer to Normal (19% Opacity).

Shadows

Time to spice it up a bit. Add in a cool, flowy stock or c4d. Place it where you think will look nice on Screen (46% Opacity). This is the one I used, and where I placed it.

+Flow

It's looking nice, but because of the adj1 + adj2, the colours of the leaves are a bit unnatural! (oops!). Duplicate the stock BG and put it under the lighting layer, but on top of every other layer. Motion blur it (same settings), and then get an eraser on 50% Opacity, and erase where the render would be visible. Put it on overlay (100% Opacity).

Adj3

Nice, the colours are looking nice. It's pretty much complete here, but I thought glowing things would make it look nice. I added in some c4d bubbles, duplicated the layer and put them on Screen (75% Opacity). I Gaussian blurred the bottom layer to give it more of a glow.

Glow

Time for adjustment layers! Yay! No need to explain these, they're for adjusting your layers, silly! My first adjustment layer was a Black->White Gradient Map. I put it on Overlay (24% Opacity).
My second adjustment layer was a photo filter on "Yellow", 25% Density, +Preserve Luminosity.
My third adjustment layer was a grey(#202020)->white Gradient Map. Softlight (33% Opacity).
My fourth adjustment layer was a Black->gold(#7b7c2b)->light yellow(#feffd5) Gradient Map. Normal (28% Opacity).

*Note: I'll put the settings in screenshots underneath + the changes.

Final Adj Layers

All that there is now, add text + Border. Border is a 1 pixel white border. Text is Code Light 18pt in white. And you're done!

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. The good thing about this is you don't need any brushes! (Banzai!)

 

Outcome

[DeathTheKid]

This is really nice. I think I'll try it out. I'll post back when I finish . Probably tomorrow though.

[† ParasiteEve]

I sit and cry from amazement. This is really awesome though, I'm gonna have to steal some of these techniques.

[Kouhai]

Thanks guys~. Haha, yeah, it's nice and simple which is why I decided to make a tutorial out of it. (All my other works have like 40 layers of mess in them, I don't even know what "layer 36 copy 2" is for!)

I'm glad to see it will be of any help. :3 I might try make some more tutorials tomorrow if I get the chance. (:

[† LimitLess]

Thanx Kouhai

 

Started using Photoshop recently, but it was tough making adjustments from GIMP.

[† poetictragedy]

Great tutorial! I'm gonna have to borrow that color adjustment trick with the Gaus Blur + Motion Blur. :3