Welcome to Day 2 of 'The Making of Cover of Prog 1835.' Roll VT!
A
2000AD COVERS UNCOVERED
Production.
Starring
STICKLEBACK
as the Kingpin of Crime.
BLACK BOB
as the Henchman.
THE SORRIES
as Bob fodder.
Produced, directed, SFX, Art Direction and everything else by
MATT 'D'ISRAELI' BROOKER.
Coming to a computer screen near you...
NOW!
Wow, inspiring stuff! Of course, Matt wouldn't let it lie with just the amazing instructional video, he had to provide some illustrated 'process porn!' Pay attention, there'll be a test at the end! Over to Matt:
Further Info.
"The paint bucket tool in Photoshop is capable of filling areas with Patterns as well as colour. Patterns in Photoshop can be any kind of image information - textures, geometric patterns, photographs, paintings - any digital image can be grabbed and registered as a Pattern to be used by the Paint Bucket Tool.
Of the graphics apps described here, Photoshop appears to be the only one that can straightforwardly use the Paint Bucket Tool to create Stickleback-style texture fills (Painter has a similar trick, but it’s more complicated). However, all the apps (except Painter) can use one layer to constrain a fill applied to another, and that’s such a useful trick for all kinds of work that I’ll show the controls here.
I’m also providing a Photoshop Pattern file containing three Stickleback textures, please note, this is a 5mb download.
How to access textures from the Paint Bucket Tool in Photoshop:
(Note: I tried this in Photoshop Elements 9 and the interface was similar enough that you can use the same instructions, except in step 1 there’s a checkbox to activate Pattern Fill)"
"(1) Click on the Paint Bucket Tool in the toolbar and (2) select “Pattern” from the Paint Bucket controls at the top of the screen."
"Click on the square next to the drop-down menu and the Patterns palette will appear. Yours will look different to this because these are all ones I made myself. Mine. My preciousss.
If you have the Patterns you want loaded already, just click the one you want to select it and you’re ready to go. If you need to load a set of patterns, here’s how to do it:"
"With the Patterns palette still open, click on the little triangle top right (circled) and pick “Load Patterns…” from the drop down list. The navigate to the pattern file you want (my Stickleback one is Diz-Patterns.pat) and click OK.
The new Patterns should load at the bottom of the palette (my patterns may take a minute to load because the pattern tiles are very big). If you want to move the pattern icons around, try using “Preset Manager…” from the same drop down list you used for loading the Patterns."
Paint Bucket Settings in Different Graphics Applications
"Photoshop, Manga Studio Ex 4, Debut and 5, Corel Painter 11.
In each case I’ve highlighted the tool in the toolbar and the specific controls for multiple layers. To get the effect shown in the video, all your tool settings need to be the same as the ones seen in the illustrations here."
"Adobe Photoshop - can fill with textures (Pattern Fill) and reads multiple layers.
(Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 - can fill with textures (Pattern Fill) and reads multiple layers.)"
"Manga Studio EX4 (and I think Debut) - no texture fill via Paint Bucket. Reads multiple layers. Has the extra neat option to read specific selected layers, ignoring the ones in between.
EX4 creates texture fills by dragging textures called “Materials” from the Materials Palette into the image. If you’ve made a selection, the Material only fills that selection, but you get a new layer every time you add a new texture. Plus, I don’t see a way of constraining the fill using a lower layer. The manual says you can save your own texture as a Material but I haven’t tried it to test any limitations."
"Manga Studio 5 - no texture fill via Paint Bucket. Reads multiple layers. Also has that neat option to read specific selected layers.
Again, MS5 creates texture fills by dragging Materials into the image. But - MS5 has Layer Masks. You should be able to create a layer full of texture, hide it all with a Layer Mask, and then use the technique shown in the video to reveal the bits you want by applying the Paint Bucket to the Layer Mask. I’ll not go any further with this as I haven’t tested it… plus, it’ll be a blog post’s worth on its own if I can get it to work.
Corel Painter 11 - Can fill with textures by a roundabout method. Cannot read multiple layers, which is surprising in an application of this class.
How to access textures from the Paint Bucket Tool in Corel Painter:
Before explaining how to use texture fill, a warning; Painter is very memory-hungry and processor-intensive. I wouldn’t recommend using it for this kind of work on high resolution files, as at best it’ll take forever and at worst it’ll just hang or crash. For high resolution work you’ll be much better off with Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements). The inability of the Paint Bucket Tool to read from multiple layers also means Painter just can’t be used for the technique shown in the video.
However, you might want to use texture fills in a different way, so here’s how it works:"
"First, you’re going to need two files; the one you want to work on and another one containing the texture pattern. These both have to be open at the same time. Here you can see the master texture file on the left and the file I’ll be adding texture to on the right."
"Go to File: Clone Source: and pick the name of the texture file (here, logically, it’s “Texture.rif”) from the drop-down list. It doesn’t matter which tool is selected when you do this."
"Click on the Paint Bucket Tool, and from the controls at the top of the screen select the “Fill:” pull-down menu and pick Source Image."
"Make a selection in the working file (left) then click with the Paint Bucket to fill it with texture."
Is that all clear then? Come back at 8am tomorrow to see the final part of this thrilling series, same time, same Matt channel!
Is that all clear then? Come back at 8am tomorrow to see the final part of this thrilling series, same time, same Matt channel!
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