My Blog

Wallpaper: The Abstract World

This post offers lot of a wallpaper-type manipulation. I had just collected anything under the sun, and poof, I came up with the idea of compiling all the stock images and making it more dramatic.


Basically, I created an all-purpose wallpaper with 1024x78 desktop. Here it is:

Painting Through Watercolor Brushes

Brushes are the most convinient tools in creating quick Photoshop art. Aside from its premade designs, working with brushes saves us a lot of time. Overlaying gradients and adding effects.


Here is another piece of art using brushes, Brusheezy's Premade brushes, for specific. I downloaded the Smudge PS brush set, so far, one of my favorite set of brushes. From its watercolor effects down to compatibility of one brush to every brush.

Tips for Creating Your Home-made City

I got some tips on creating a hoax city of yours. Not just some good experimentation is needed here, but also the strategic way of developing your "weird city", and of course, patience.


This photo was taken somewhere in the road of Davao City 2 years ago. This road has taken a lot of interest from me, aside from it's rare angle, I also considered how it was put up and the way it was, natural.

This is the original photo, before it was being manipulated, it is dull and the level of contrast is somehow untied.

After collecting additional photos: A Globe, a building from another photo, and a signage from Google search, I've come up with this:

Here are some tips in making this some sort of trash (LOL):

1.) Patience - of course.

2.) Compatibility - select photos which contain good angles, and compatible angles with other photos.
3.) Be guided with Levels (ctrl + L) and Curves (ctrl + M) - you don't want to make your output look dry, aren't you?

4.) Filters, Filters, Filters - involve the Filter menu in whatever you manipulate. I used Radial Blur in that photo to make it look dashing or in-motion.

5.) Burn with the Burn Tool (O) - levels and curves are not enough to create desired shadows or highlights, that's why we use burn tool to darken certain parts of the photo, and dodge tool to lighten it.

6.) Gradient Overlays - to create a certain tone of photo, use gradient overlay to transform highly saturated photos into low saturated photos or vice versa. With this, you could also set some standard tuning of colors

7.) Experiment, Explore - well, that explains a lot. Just buzz me if you got anything new.

Glossy Font Effect

This is a good old tutorial on how to make an appealing font effect through nice combination of colors and font. This is the very first tutorial I've learned in Photoshop.

Since you are already reading this, I thinkg I could share some tips here. There are tons of tutorials regarding a glossy font effect with reflection in it, but this 17 ways of creating Glossy Font make me more comfortable though.


1.) Open a new document in any size and fill the background with white (#ffffff) or black (#000000)
2.) Type in your desired text. In this preview I type "reflection" and set the font style on Bahaus 93 and set the font color to lighter blue (#58b7d3)
3.) now set the foreground color to #7eb5e8 (lighter blue) and the background color to #326978 (darker blue).
4.) then go to blending options (right click the text layer and select blending options).
5.) after selecting blending options, check the gradient overlay box and set the ff:

angle - 90 degrees
opacity - 100 percent
scale - 100 percent
blend mode: normal
gradient: select the gradient blue, the colors we set above (lighter blue to darker blue)

6.) now you have a font with a gradient overlaid in it, now we will add a gloss on the font's upper part (darker part).

7.) create a circular shape on the upper part of the created font. Notice that the shape have almost covered the font.

8.) Then, rasterize (layers palette>right click layer>rasterize) the newly made circle. After rasterizing, be sure to select the newly rasterized layer of the circle and hold down CTRL while clicking the text layer (REFLECTION word). If you got it right, there would be running lines (marquee) containing the font.

9.) Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert the selection made instead of the text, the selection would now be outside the word. Press delete to remove the outer part of the circle. If you got it correctly, the inner part of the circle is slightly covering the font, so reduce the opacity into 17 percent.

10.) Select the eraser tool (E) to erase the upper part of your circle. You can also make the brush solid or soft-edged, it depends on how it appears to you

Now, we will try to add a reflection to have a more dramatic approach here, not really.

11.) merge all the visible, but do not include the background layer.
12.) then duplicate the merged layer font.
13.) ctrl + t to rotate the duplicated layer to 180 degrees.
14.) hold down alt + shift while dragging the left side button of the duplicated layer to its right side (if you did it correctly, the "font effect will still be read, but it is inverse.)
15.) then reduce its opacity to 50 percent
16.) pressed "e" to select the eraser tool, and set its opacity to 43 and its flow to 80
17.) erase the bottom part of the duplicated layer carefully, and erase it until you'll get your favored result.

Here is the final result:

Shape and Fonts Manipulation

With the use of pen tool (P), shape tool (U) and fonts in Photoshop, I manage to create a not so appealing art for my Plurk account. Proper use and positioning of different font styles and oval tool is the keypoint here.

Since my creative juice is running low that time, I made up my mind with black and white colors, and added another edited photo I got, which I'll post in my later posts. Promise. Here it is:



Here you go! Next time, i'll post the photo above with slight tutorials on how to come up with it's looks.

Lines in Retro Approach

Recently, I managed to produced a not so Pop Art-ish, but somehow, I was able to consider its colors. Basically, bright and complementary colors are usually put up in making pop art, with some wordy stuffs.

In this 1024x768 wallpaper, that i've created, I got the idea of reconsidering the lines which basically express the whole thought of the manipulation. I tried to reproduce it in a quite large numbers with different width to pop out each color in the set. To finish the attempt, I transformed the image of the Retro-ish woman into grayscale (image>mode>grayscale) and overlaid a layer with brown fill-in to make it look flatter. Here's the final output:

Click to view original size