Bob Unplugged

Long ago, in another lifetime, I used to draw cartoons without any computer involvement at any stage of the process. I recently ran across this example of my purely analog work while digging through some of my archives. It was a birthday present for Bob, the spouse of a co-worker when I was working for the advertising department of Home Depot; a caricature created in ink and colored pencil. A more recent photo of Bob is shown for an idea of how close I captured him back in ’94.

Photoshop Brushes

Here are four flowery, grassy looking, Photoshop brushes that I created while messing around with Illustrator. They are free for you to use in any way that you like. I hope you find them useful.

Corner Splat Vectors

Here are two vector splatter corners, flipped for your convenience and free for use in any way you choose. Click on the image below to download.

Chopper Brushes

Here are a few aircraft and helicopter Photoshop brushes I’ve made from some U.S Government DOD EPS images. I hope you find them useful.

iPhone E6B

Even though I’m not flying currently due to economic conditions, I may have to get this pilot gadget just for the sake of the cool interface the developers implemented. For the uninitiated ground-pounder, it’s a pilot’s flight calculator that takes the place of a unique and surprisingly fun to use, circular slide rule called an E6B.

The interface of this iPhone PFMA is modeled to have the same look and feel of a Flight Management System (FMS) that you might find in a commercial aircraft. When you consider that the metal version costs about $25.00, and a student grade cardboard E6B costs about $12.00, you can’t ask for a better bargain than $6.00. John Ewing over at Aviation Mentor gives it a very favorable recommendation and that’s enough for me.

Photoshop Brushes

Here are a few fighter plane Photoshop brushes I’ve created for your use. An F-15 Eagle, F-16 Falcon, A-10 Warthog and an F-4 Phantom. Click on the image below to download.

Caveman Cartoon

Here’s a recent cartoon for a little league soccer team. I’ve also recently started using a brush pen for inking. It seems to give me a smoother and more dynamic line than the steel nibs. It’s very easy to get a broad stroke and transition to a fine line. It also encourages me to be looser with my inks and I like that.

Illustrator Brushes

Here are a couple of quick Illustrator brushes for you to use in any way you like. Click on the image below to download.

Photoshop Selections

Part 3

Type

The Type tool contains a flyout showing a dotted ‘T’. With this tool active, when you type text in the dialog box and hit OK, instead of foreground colored text appearing on your image, the text appears as “marching ants”, or as an active selection ready for your command.

Magic Wand

The Magic Wand sees an image as composed of shades of gray (0-255), even though what you see may be in color. When we specify a number in the dialog box, we are really telling the magic wand how many values of grays to select. The higher the Tolerance number, the wider the range of values that will be selected.
To use the wand, just input a number into the Tolerance dialog box and click in the area to be selected. An contiguous area of color with all of the pixels within the Tolerance limit will be selected. If your selection isn’t quite right, you may have to adjust the Tolerance number up or down, or choose Select>Grow or Select>Similar.
Add non-contiguous areas to the selection by Shift-clicking. The Anti-aliased checkbox is used to select Anti-aliased images (blurred edges when viewed close up, a technique to smooth edges).
The Sample Merged checkbox tells Photoshop to use either all visible layers when making a selection, or only the active
layer.

Color Range

Color Range is very close to the magic wand in effect, but learning to use it is a little more tricky. Select>Color Range will bring up the preview window showing a grayscale version of your image. The Fuzziness slider can be thought of like the Tolerance number of the magic wand: it limits the range of colors selected.
But it will also select the color range sampled with the eyedropper, over the entire image, not just contiguous areas, very much like Select>Similar.
Selections created here are based on all visible layers, so unwanted layers need to be made temporarily invisible by turning off their “eye” in the layers palette. White areas in the preview window are selected and gray areas are partially selected.
To add or subtract a range of color in the selection, use either the + or – eyedroppers, or you can click and drag the plain eyedropper using Shift to add, or Option to subtract. Expanding your options even more, you can use the Fuzziness slider to fine-tune your selection, and you also have the choice of making your selection based on specific colors, or by value: Highlights, Midtones or Shadows.

Photoshop Brushes

Presenting ten Photoshop brushes for you to use any way you like. Click on the preview image below to download the zipped .abr file. I hope you find them useful.