Posts Tagged ‘art’

the art of Onion Head

Today is a truly beautiful day. I woke up later than usual, the sun was shining, and I felt wonderful. As I stepped outside to start my day by heading to work, I felt the wonderful 55° F temperatures that told me winter was coming. (ok, even though it is going to be around 90° F for the high today, I have to remember that I live in Texas) Today my heart is filled with happiness and love, unlike most days when it is filled with a black coal hatred so deep no light can escape it.

Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked, the happiness reminded me of these crazy little Chinese animated icons, that I adore, called Onion Head. I use them for my messenger, and proceed to crack up with each use.

I wish I could read their website, because I’d love to learn more about how they started with the series. These little animated characters evoke a wide range of emotion (and unbridled cuteness) that is far more advanced than other animated icons I have seen.

Onion Head works really well at displaying my emotions on my blackest-black-heart days as well.

All Onion Head images courtesy of The Onion Club at blog.roodo.com.

using textures effectively

You want a matured and completed look to your illustration, but there’s something missing. I find this problem in a lot of illustrations created purely in Photoshop, everything still looks too smooth and sterile. Often, adding a simple paper texture layer will do the trick. Natural looking textures bring harmony to finish up your illustration. We’ll look at the texture application in my Tattoo illustration as an example.

Tools:
• Adobe Photoshop (CS or higher)
• Downloaded or scanned old paper texture (high res.)
• Nearly completed illustration

Open your nearly completed illustration in Photoshop. Open your preferred texture file and place it onto your illustration as a new layer.

Oh, you don’t have a texture you want to use? Okay, let’s backtrack for a minute. Here are your options:

• Take high resolution photographs of textures you like
• Scan in (at high res.) flat textures
• Create your own texture in Photoshop (I don’t do this, but it can be done)
• Or the lazy easy fix, search and download (ahhh, the power of Google)

I will make it even easier for you, with some links to start you off right: mayang.com/textures, and texturewarehouse.com. (remember to give credit when required)

Now, pull you’re texture onto your illustration. Set the blending property of this new layer to multiply and the opacity to 30%.

Duplicate your newly created texture layer (by dragging it onto the new layer icon in your layers pallet). This second texture layer should be above your original texture layer. Let’s set these properties to Linear Burn at 50%.

Here is the paper I used.

Old Paper Texture

You can mess with the blending properties, you can add more texture layers, feel free to experiment.

The first frame has no textures, the second frame has the one layer of texture at 30%, and the third has the second texture layer at 50%. I am always pleasantly surprised by the huge difference only a simple texture can make.

Texture Process

Tags: art, design, illustration, textures, tutorial
Filed under: art & design tutorials