1. Turning a Person into a Silhouette
Masking a person from a white background
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Smoothing out the edges of a jagged mask
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2. Making the Silhouette Fly
Adding power and motion with Liquify
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Puppet warping the legs closer together
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Applying a perspective-style transformation
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Smoothing and removing details with Liquify
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3. Painting the Body and the Face
Filling and stroking the silhouette
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Drawing with the Pen and Brush tools
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Hand-painting the face
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Refining brushstrokes with Median and Minimum
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4. Creating a Dramatic Background
Adding complementary colored clouds
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Drawing a handful of spikes in Illustrator
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Creating a burst pattern with Transform
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Adjusting the spikes for a better effect
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Bringing the burst pattern into Photoshop
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5. Adding the Grill Lines
Creating the extreme paths for the grill lines
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Blending the grill lines in Illustrator
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Correcting potential blending problems
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Bringing the blended paths into Photoshop
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Simulating pressure when stroking paths
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Contouring the grill lines onto the face
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6. Drawing Hands
Drawing a hand with the Pen tool
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Converting the hand path to a shape layer
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Finishing off the hands and gloves
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7. Adding the Flames
Blend, scale, and rotate photographic flames
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Filling in gaps with symmetrical flames
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Shooting flames out of the hero's hands
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Stroking the composite flames
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8. Every Composition Needs Refinement
Drawing cartoon flames as a shape layer
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Enhancing the flames with layer effects
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Adjusting Puppet Warp and Expansion
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9. The Monologue and Talk Balloons
Installing a free comic-lettering font
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Formatting the monologue text
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Drawing the talk balloons (a.k.a. speech bubbles)
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10. Creating a Custom Font
Selecting a font-creation software
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Drawing consistently rendered letterforms
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Pasting the letters into Glyphs Mini (Mac only)
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Copying capitals into lowercase positions (Mac only)
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Generating an OpenType font (Mac only)
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Stylizing the custom font in Photoshop
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Conclusion
Time lapse of the retro superhero
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Until next time
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Ex_Files_Retro_Superhero.zip
(1.6 GB)