The general identity was created by Andy 2 years ago, based on the famous covers of Penguin books. We decided to keep that, as we liked that approach a lot. From there, here’s what we came up with:

We’ve also developed the design for the programs of each show, as well as the template for the Red Post advertising system we have in town (digital sign advertising).

There are plans in the work to sell some limited editions of these on 13 Spade. Maybe even some signed by the cast. We’ll keep you posted.

Hello there. We wanted to write a quick post about what’s going on at Studio Ace of Spade (and to show you that we’re not slacking). So here’s what’s happening, in no particular order:

• We’re working on the Early Upgrade web app. More about this soon!
• We unveiled new prints for 13 Spade, Cold tone and Warm tone. We’re also working on expanding the line with other prints from us and others.
• We’re working on the branding (and web presence) of a law firm, Comerford and Dougherty. Watch the progress of the project on Dribbble.
• We made a new year’s print and released some freebies
• After the success of our 2 first posts for Smashing Magazine (about textures in web design and business processes applied to low budget projects), we’re working hard on our 3rd post. It’ll focus on how to pick up on clients red flags, and some ideas on how to deal with them
• We’re almost ready to unveil the full series of posters we did for New World Arts, after unveiling the illustrations late last year
• We’re (slowly) working on the branding for Kansas Bible Company
• And much more that we can’t even talk about!

Cool list, but what does all of this look like?

You should go check it out, and admire the rest of the images selected for that day as well.

Let me apologize in advance for the length of the story behind the poster, but these have been long in the making.

I’ve been playing guitar for a little over 8 years now (and I’ve become really skilled… or not). Right when I started playing guitar, I also started to be passionate about the gear my favorite guitar players were using. That’s when I learned about tube amplifiers and solid state amplifier. Right after that, I learned about their price, and ended up buying a solid state Marshall amp, and focusing on buying a cool guitar instead.

The year after starting to learn guitar, I also started to study industrial and product design. This is probably what educated me to appreciate the beauty of objects sometimes designed solely for industrial purposes: big industrial fans, factories, product building chains (think about car factories), computer chips, etc.

That’s also the year when I started to discover the beauty of grunge music: Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, etc. Nirvana naturally led me to Foo Fighters, even if it was late. The Foo Fighters ended up leading me to this release, which cover has been designed by the immensely talented folks at Invisible Creature. I put my hands on this album when it came out, and forgot about it for a while.

Then, last year, as we geared up to get the 13 Spade collection ready,  I saw that cover art again. And then I came across the image below:

And then, I found the National Valve Museum. Which has stuff like this on file:

Being a sucker for vintage stuff like this, and because the strange complexity of their inner filaments and components combined with the tiny scale, I decided I absolutely needed to do a tube based poster. I reached out to Allan, who’s the man behind the impressive, massive and meticulously organized collection at the National Valve Museum in order to get reference photos, which he kindly provided.

Then, I set out to try to conceptualize something… and failed. Then work and life happened, and we moved on to other concepts for the 13 Spade first series of posters.

A few weeks ago, the holidays were giving me the perfect excuse to do some more “personal” work again (especially since Project 52 was on hold). So I started drawing again. My first intention was to draw/trace the tube, and then to ink it digitally.

The drawing:

The digital inking attempt:

This one obviously failed because my drawing was way too crude (on this topic, I’d recommend reading Von Glitschka’s Vector Basic Training! More about this soon). I made a second attempt:

I deem this 2nd attempt as failed as well. I don’t know why, but this just wasn’t hitting home. So I decided to scrap this altogether and to use another technique I’ve learned on the GoMediaZine to digitize and vectorize the tube, starting from the picture Allen provided for me:

The result was much more satisfying to me:

Not only was it closer to what I was envisioning in terms of details (even the sweet vintage type and logos made it), it was also much cleaner in a way. After further refinements (and a halftone treatment) and the selection of my color palette, I was finally ready to start my texture magic.

Once Warm tone was done, I decided that a sister print pointing out the difference between tube sound and transistor (solid state) sound was in order. And that’s how the diptych is born. The awesome Homestead font by Luke Lisi was just a perfect fit, even though I was hesitating at some point for the Cold tone type treatment. You can follow the steps of my progression through the design process starting at this Dribbble shot and by following the rebound stream.

A special thank you to…

I would like to take the time to thank Allan Wyatte, the man behind the National Valve Museum.

Without his willingness to share the high resolution EL34 picture for free, this crazy idea would have never happened. Or at least, the result wouldn’t have been the same. His efforts to build the Museum are just incredible, and he’s done an amazing job at collecting, photographing and sorting all of these references. And since we donated some money and purchased the Museum’s DVD, maybe there’ll be other tube themed prints, who knows…

The prints

Cold tone

Warm tone

Thanks for following this in its entirety! We’ll let you know as soon as these are added to the shop (requests/willingness to pre-order could speed up the process).

By the time you’re reading this, it should be January 1st, 2012. The whole team here would like to wish you a happy new year, and all the best for your endeavors in this fresh set of 365 days (that is if the Mayan calendar thing isn’t true) that’s ahead of us.

Announcements

Here at the Studio, we decided to kick off the new year right by making a few announcements:

• We’re doing a “Kicking off the Year of the Apocalypse by cleaning out the inventory” sale on 13 Spade! It’ll happen for a limited time only, and it’s the perfect spot to get these late holidays gifts. Please remember that this first run is the only one we’ll do on canvas, and there were only 10 prints of each. And there might be a little surprise hidden along with the first, let’s say, 10 orders.  Finally, the inventory has already taken a good toll during 2011.
• We created a small poster bundle, combining the prints “Air traveling” and “Broadcasting” in a diptych. It’s (almost) 2 prints for the price of 1!
• New prints to launch soon! Here are some sneak peeks (that you might have already seen if you followed our Tumblr and Dribbble shots closely these days):

Also, beyond that, we’ve got a couple truckloads of work in the pipes for January and February. Some really exciting projects, that we can’t wait to share with you.

Freebies!

We also decided to jump start the year by giving away some texture freebies.

The first batch is a series of scan of a Polaroid picture that turned out completely wrong (film expired for way too long). We scanned it in its original state, but we also wanted to know what what inside of it.

The second series is a couple scans from a piece of heavy paper/cardstock.

These scans are high resolution scans (600 to 2400 dpi), and should be fit for any design projects, from print to web. That high resolution means that it’s going to be 2 long downloads, and 2 big Zip archives. The first archive is named “saos-2012-kickoff-freebie-pack-2012.01-polaroid.zip” and weighs 87+ Mb, the second one is named “saos-2012-kickoff-freebie-pack-2012.01-heavy-paper-full-resolution.zip” and weighs 328 Mb! Just click on the links to start the downloads.

We choose to use a Creative Commons license to release them:

This work by Studio Ace of Spade is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

That means that you can use them in commercial and personal projects, with or without attribution (although sourcing them would be nice). What’s forbidden is for you to sell them or to claim you’ve created them. Feel free to share what you did with them!

Also, something tells me freebies like these might become a regular thing over at a certain blog that we’re the editors for, but shhht. Stay tuned for more!

2011 is (almost) dead, long live 2012! Well, the year is coming to an end, and it has been an incredible one for Studio Ace of Spade. It has seen, in no particular order:

• Our first full year in business, and the one year anniversary of our collaboration
• A clear increase in the volume of inquiries from potential clients
• Truckloads of amazing projects coming through our doors
• Some great long-term collaborations started with our clients
• The Studio being published twice on Smashing Magazine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio taking over as editors for the GoMediaZine
• The Studio being published as tutorial authors on the GoMediaZine (“career goal” achieved!)
• The Studio being awarded a grant by the Goshen College Business Department
• Our first exhibit at a design festival (Weapons of Mass Creation Fest 2011)
• The opening of our online store 13 Spade
• An almost successful attempt to start a weekly project (Project 52)
• And much more!

2011 project highlights

• 13 Spade
  13 Spade is our very own online store, where you can find some of the posters we design in our spare time but also some other talented artists’ creations.

• Kelly Jae’s Café
  Kelly Jae’s Café is restaurant located on the main drag in downtown Goshen, Indiana that serves unique and delicious foods. With a unique dining experience, Kelly Jae’s can serve as a casual or formal meeting place.

• Menno Tea
  Menno Tea began as a small, on-campus business venture started by Hans Weaver and Niles Graber Miller, both underclassmen at Goshen College. As their distribution area increased, Menno Tea came to us looking for a new design for their bottle as well as a facelift for their website.

• Fletcher Drive
  Fletcher Drive is a web comedy series started by Paddy Connor and Robert Dierx. It’s characters are in and out of touch with reality, and its creators were looking for a brand and web presence which were simple and memorable.

• Writing for Smashing Magazine
  The Studio wrote 2 articles for Smashing Magazine in 2011, and we hope to get at least 3 times as much out in 2012. We wrote about the use of textures in webdesign and about cost-cutting business processes.

• Writing for the GoMediaZine
  We finally got a stab at writing a much requested tutorial about how we use textures in our poster work. The icing on the cake is that we got it published on the GoMediaZine, which has been one of our objectives for a while.

• The Lost & Taken poster
  In the past couple years, there has been a renewed interest in textures in design. It’s gone beyond being a trend, and has been a wonderful tool in the designers and artists toolbox to add visual depth and interest to a project (…). The next step for a designer is to constitute an arsenal of textures, in order to expand the options at his/her hands. (..) After the years, it’s clear to us here at the Studio that in terms of texture resources available online, Lost and Taken has been the most helpful website in this endeavor.

• Kansas Bible Company
  The Kansas Bible Company is a band started by a bunch of our college friends. They asked us to create a poster for their first gig back in the area since they moved to Nashville, TN. We currently have more in the works for them…

• David Culp & Co.
  David Culp & Co. LLP is a full-service firm with collective experiences in all forms of taxation, as well as for profit and not-for-profit accounting, compilation, attestation, and business planning and consulting services. They came to the Studio needing a new website.

What the hell happened to Project 52?

Project 52 was and still is a dear project to us. The concept is quite simple:  for every week of 2011, we would release a quote based poster (see ALAD by Luke Beard for inspiration). We were on the right tracks, and managed to complete 26 installments (the good in math people will notice that’s half of what we planned for).

At first, a failure of one of our trusted computer slowed down our client work so much that we had to catch up on it in priority. The project got put on hold. What happened on top of it is that we got a lot of client work coming in at once. This made us shelve the project for so long it was impossible to catch up before the end of the year. And so, this is how the 2011 Project 52 became Project 26.

The goal for 2012 is to finish that project (we have 2 series of preselected movies and songs already ready!).

Some conclusion notes

2011: awesome year. 2012, hold tight, as we’re planning to go above and beyond!

You should go check it out and let us know what you think.

Before We Get Started

Hello, dear readers!

We’d like to take a minute to do something that we’ve been looking to do for quite some time now – provide you all with a run down of our processes on our projects.

Today, we have an opportunity to unveil a case study of our recent project – the poster we did for Lost and Taken.

We already had a writeup including some tips and tricks about textures published recently by Smashing Magazine, but it was web oriented, whereas this focuses around our print operation and how we interact with our clients.

We’ll walk you through the project from the initial contact with the client to the end product. We’ll show you the email exchanges, the reference research phase, the type research phase and the execution in both Illustrator (Ai) and Photoshop (Ps).

If you have questions, want to suggest different techniques, would like to suggest ideas on how to make this better, please do so in the comments! Also, we’d like to precise there is a complimentary article to this case study posted on the GoMediaZine that details much more the tutorial part. We decided to split the original post in half (-ish), as we thought 6000+ words would be a bit intense for people to go through.

Here’s a preview of what we’re going to be creating, beautifully mocked up:

How it Started

These days, the internet is truly an amazing tool; projects can start after a tweet, or a Facebook status update. And that’s exactly what happened!

From there, the next logical step was to email Caleb. We have had the chance to have chatted a lot previously, as we have ideas we’re (really slowly) working on together. This explains the pretty relaxed way we were exchanging in the emails. If this was a client we didn’t know that well, we would be much more formal in our writing.

After this email from Caleb, we answered with our price. As this article’s point isn’t pricing, we won’t reveal how much we charged Caleb for the poster. What we can tell you is that we were pretty much “industry standard” on this one. Also, we want to point you towards a fantastic post about pricing from Jessica Hische, the talented and well known designer.

We also gave Caleb answers and ideas on poster sizes, printing places… And we gave him some initial thoughts and the first ideas that popped up in our heads when we heard the terms “Lost and Taken,” “Poster design,” and “Textures.”

In terms of a design brief, you can see that this project was pretty open. Caleb knows our work, because he’s seen it before, and because we shared it a lot with him as we’re avid users of the texture packs he creates.

As a designer, the absence of constraints can seem great, but slowly you’ll realize you’re navigating uncharted waters. You could say that design is what happens when pure art and purpose collide, but we’ll leave this debate on the side for today.

At this point, the next step is to frame what our client wants.

A quick note about our business process

Even with all the trust existing between the client and us, you’ll notice that we sent him a contract. As we explain to our clients, there’s nothing personal. It’s not a matter of distrust. It’s simply good business practice: a contract protects both parties involved in a project, and helps to put clearly in writing the responsibilities, expectations and who will get what at the end of the project. Bill Beachy (Go Media’s president) already talked about contracts (as well as pricing) on this very blog. There’s also Mike Monteiro‘s F*ck you, pay me video that deals with this a lot.

The beginning of the design process

So, where were we? The project had been roughly defined, a price had been agreed upon and a contract was on the way to the client. Yet, the content of that poster was still unclear.

Here’s what we knew:

• It’s a poster that will be 18″ x 24″ in dimensions.
• A focus on a strong type element.
• There’s plenty of creative freedom.

Playing with type

We started by playing with typefaces. For those following our Project 52, we’ve created similar pieces: a mix of type and visuals centered around the meaning of a quote.

To narrow down our font choices, we opened Illustrator and went through our font library to select some which fit the “vibe” of the project. Round one of font choices resulted in:

We attempted to “gut feel” which fonts fit the project’s broad guidelines. We chose sans-serif and slab-serif fonts in order to convey a ‘vintage’ look, a direction which we wanted to pursue.

We’d like to point out The Lost Type Co-op, Hydro74′s Legacy of Defeat, Dafont, Font Squirrel and Abduzeedo’s Friday Fresh Free Fonts as great starting spots to find interesting typefaces. Most of the time they are free and/or donationwares, which means that if you can financially support work that you like or benefits you.

As we were working on some other poster projects at the same time, something else happened – another project “contaminated” this one.

You know how it goes, you’re working on two different things at once, and you start having sketches and drafts in Project A looking like those from Project B. In order to get that “contamination” out of our systems, we grabbed our trusted Helvetica Neue and hammered out a concept.

Once these two files were ready, we also browsed our previous work and some of our favorites pieces to build a mood board. Mood boards are important for us; when we have an open ended project, we share them with the client for validation and guidance. Here’s the mood board we used:

(With work from Luke Beard and his ALAD project, Jamie Coull, CMYKA and his MSCED project, Andre Meca, Ryan Stever, Brandon Lesley, César Valença, Exurban and us)

And here’s the email we sent to Caleb:

Caleb’s answer was giving us the framework we’ve been lacking so far:

From this email, we learned that

• We should think “nature,” green and forest scene (or something like that…)
• Cut-out shapes are something he’s interested in
• Geometrical shapes are also something our client likes

It was time to gather visuals

Even though Caleb pointed out a nature themed poster to us, the fonts and our hearts pointed us towards a vintage industrial feel. Think heavy industry — old smoky factories, gigantic presses, retro-futurism, neo-retro and steampunk. You can also think Metropolis (you know, the Fritz Lang movie). We were fascinated with structures, hence the electrical castles and steel bridges.

In terms of visuals, we LOVE the Flickr and Wikimedia Commons collections. If you’re not familiar with them yet, these are images that are with no known copyright restrictions. We use these image banks very much in our work. A good portion of our posters feature elements from there. The downside is that you won’t always find the exact shot you’re looking for.

We then constructed a second mood board from these Flickr Commons images:

Type refinements

After Caleb’s feedback, we refined our type list.

As you can see, slab-serifs and ‘vintage’ looking sans-serif were the most common. Caleb caught us on Google Chat to let us know the following:

As you can see, he caught us while we were working on the type: we linked to our work in progress via imgur. Here’s the document we showed him:

We were playing with this font called Massive Dynamite, created by imagex. If you go on the font page on Dafont, you’ll see that the font is “pre-grunged.”

Let’s say we’re not huge fans of that, and that we’d rather apply our own grunge effect with brushes or textures, as it’s more realistic and more “organic.”

Cleaning up Massive Dynamite

The next steps were clear:

1. Write “LOST AND TAKEN” in Massive Dynamite
2. Create outlines (right click on the type object > Create outlines) of the type, to convert it to fully editable vector objects
3. Switch the font from solid black to a transparent object with a black stroke
4. Then comes the tedious part. By using the direct selection tool (the white arrow, A on your keyboard), I selected the paths corresponding to the grunge elements and deleted them, thus creating a “clean” font

We made a quick video summarizing this process. You’ll see it’s really simple.

Since the font had been cleaned we progressed to completing our typelock.We also complemented the clean font with our own grunge to ensure a uniqueness to the font.

However, we never lock our clients into a singular option unless the budget demands it. So, when we prepared the typelock for the poster, we provided Caleb with 2 other options:

The options were based on Alpenkreuzer, a font with a great retro-industrial feel (1940s/1950s), and Bevan, a slab-serif that Caleb liked a lot from our revised font sheet. The process for these was the same. See what Caleb had to say about them:

It became clear that the poster would be nature-themed with the Massive Dynamite type element. It was time to move to Photoshop.

Choosing a main image

We still hadn’t settled on the “base” image of the poster. After our last conversation with Caleb, we went back to the Commons collection, and dug some more images out. This time, we were specifically targeting large files — big enough to be used at a print resolution (300 dpi).

The neat thing with the Flickr Commons is that a big part of the collection comes from the Library of Congress (LoC) and the U.S. National Archives (USNA).

These organizations have a policy to provide a relatively high resolution documents on Flickr. For instance, a train picture we used in a recent gig poster is available at a whopping 3000×2019 pixels. And sometimes, when following the permalink to the web collections of the LoC or the USNA, you can find ultra-high resolution .tiff scans of the originals (an example: 8000×7000 pixels @ 1800 dpi). Here’s the 3rd and last mood board:

You’ll spot some images of industrial landscapes. We were planning to use them as overlays, but that didn’t happen. The image we settled on is the next to last in the right column.

We chose a photo from the LoC collection over the other forest scenes because it was the biggest (6041×7839 pixels). The only downside was that we had to download a 135+ MB .tiff. But with an image chosen, it was finally time to switch to Photoshop for real!

Starting to manipulate the textures

This is where the fun begins! This is where we’ll work our texture magic on both the type and the background photo, blending them together in the best possible way. We’ll cover our main texturing technique, some tips and tricks, and additional goodness below.

Because this poster is done to promote Lost and Taken, we decided to use only L&T made textures. Here’s a list of the packs we used  if you’re interested:

• Vintage paper textures vol. 1 (published at Design Kindle)
• 42 vintage paper textures
• 15 vintage stained paper textures
• 19 block print textures
• Old film textures: color edition
• Black and white grunge vol. 2 (published at StockVault)
• Apple Rainbow inspired textures
• 10 experimental noise textures
• White grunge + snow textures

We’re also users of two Photoshop actions created by the good folks of Go Media. The actions age your artwork in two different manners. The first one was created by Jeff to specifically distress and age type. You can grab it in the post he introduced it in.

The second action is from a two part vintage poster tutorial written by Tim Boesel. The tutorial is awesome, you should read it too. But if you just want the action, it’s in part 2.

Let’s recap the resources: the textures, the actions, the type piece and the high resolution .tiff file of the base photo. Photoshop and Illustrator were open. We geared up with coffee turned on some good music. And, off we went!

Prepping the background

We started by placing the source image. It features the frame of the slide it’s been scanned from, which we decided not to keep in our poster.

After placing the image we decided to sharpen it by using the high pass filter (Filter > Other > High Pass). Oliver Barrett already explained the process previously in great length, so we won’t go over it again.

We then applied a black and white adjustment layer on the high-passed layer. This helps to increase the contrast and depth of the image.

We cycled through the included settings for the adjustment layer, and settled on Red filter. We applied the black and white effect just to the high passed layer.

We decided that just adding textures on top of the photo would be a bit bland. So, what could we do to spice it up? We remembered a book cover we designed which had a similar starting point: a forest view. We also remembered a photo manipulation from Luke Beard. We decided to try something in a similar spirit.

We opened Illustrator and created an 18″x24″ document. In our new document we created the following pattern:

We flipped our image upside-down and applied the pattern with the following result:

We weren’t sold on the result shown above. We went back into the layer mask editing mode, and simply inverted its content.

We were much happier about the result. We decided to further tweak the content of that layer mask, notably by adding a worn aspect to it. Here’s where we wound up – just a tad less sharp, less clean. Much more organic. After that pattern was a success, we decided to repeat the experiment with a second one:

Decidedly, we wanted to push the feel into a more ‘modern’ arena. We distorted the image further:

Adding Texture and Depth

Going back to the resource section of the project, we grabbed paper41.jpg from the 42 vintage paper textures pack, vintage_stained_texture_5.jpg from the 15 vintage stained paper textures pack, and scan32.jpg from the Vintage Paper Vol. 1 pack.

The first one is used because of its beautiful paper grain. The second features some interesting dirt spots, speckles and intensity variations. The third has some folds and worn marks on it that will help to give the aged feel we’re looking for. So, after some playing around, we integrated the textures, winding up here:

The levels

Here’s a quick demonstration of how we use levels to bring out the texture goodness. We’re using scan32.jpg as the support for this example.

The blending modes

For a detailed blending mode explanation, we’ll invite you to go through this Visual guide to layer blending modes, done by Franz of FudgeGraphics’ fame.

These are the blending modes we settled on:

Let’s say it now: we are big fans of overlay and soft light. These 2 modes allow the details of the texture to translate on the design, without being overbearing (at least most of the time). They also don’t darken or weaken color, but actually tend to “saturate” it (sometimes so much that we add a saturation adjustment layer to desaturate portions of the image). When placing a texture in a design, we tend to go quickly through the full list of blending modes and to choose the one that fits the best.

Black and white textures

Well, proceeding with black and white textures helps to use the texture for the grain and detail they’ll bring to the piece without having to worry about color correcting the piece all the time along the way. Sometimes, we won’t desaturate a texture, but it’s really rare and accomplishes a really specific purpose (the texture’s colors match or complement the color scheme of the project you’re currently working on). The other cool thing is that it allows you to pick a specific color scheme for your project, and not to be dependent on finding the right texture with the right color, or to spend hours adjusting them.

This is actually why we have that color layer on top of our textures. Even if we felt the design was looking sweet with the contrast of the black, upside down forest, we wanted to bring at least a hint of color into these black spots.

The color overlay

In order to provide a more natural feel to our poster, we utilized the Laurel green (#a7a761) from one of our personal color swatches. We were planning on playing with just the opacity of the color layer, Multiply, Overlay and Soft light.

It looks neat, but we loose a lot of contrast, and we want the background to be much more discernible.

This is what happens typically while using multiply: everything becomes darker. Not a fit for our goal either.

Here’s where something awesome happened. We were ready to switch to overlay, when we made a wrong click and the blending mode that got selected was darken. Admire the result:

Because of darken‘s properties, the color got mostly applied to the black and white elements from our upside-down forest image, and the rest of the background stays mostly untouched. Mistakes can sometime show you the way.

Playing with the type

Now that the background was done, it was time to add the type. We placed the text in the poster and used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and a layer mask to integrate the type.

Now, the type was blending in better, with a more natural “fall” color. Oh, before we forget: the original color we applied to the type in Ai was #faf9a6. The color is called “Crocus yellow” in that Chevy color swatch.

But that’s not it. As you can see, there’s also a layer mask with some grunge effect on the typelock’s group. Here’s a before/after shot

Bringing it all together

Long story short, we use a fairly complicated process for our ‘global texturing.’ To give you an idea of exactly how complicated it is, just take a look at the screenshot below.

So, there are (from bottom to top): some block print textures, a film texture (it features a bunch of scratches and a frame), one of the black and white grunge vol. 2 texture, one of the rainbow grunge, some noise textures (think dust and speckles) and another white grunge + snow texture.

We followed the same process as when we textured the background. It’s a combination of carefully selected textures, desaturated, leveled, sharpened, patiently experimented blending modes that does the trick here. Let’s look at the details for the later:

As you can see, these are mostly on soft light. I played with the opacity as some of these textures were way too strong. Some notes per layer:

• The 2 block print textures are different ones, amongst the last ones in the texture pack
• Rainbow3 and Rainbow3 copy are the same texture. The one above has been rotated of 180°
• The first Experimental noise 6 has been inverted on top of being sharpened, the 2 following ones are just sharpened and the above one of the pair rotated of 180°
• Same scenario for the 2 top ones (same texture rotated)

Finishing touches

If you’d look at our top layer group, called comp, here’s what you would find:

That comp layer, then a copy of it which has been applied the Aged 1 action, another copy of it which got Aged 2 applied and a halftone layer.

We started to create comps because we were sometimes experiencing weird color shifts when saving without it. This seems to either solve it, or to show the shift on the comp layer, which you can then correct with adjustment layers (recreate a comp layer after the adjustments).

The halftone effect

We perfected our halftone effect over time, after reading a couple tutorials that were including it (the main one being this one, written by Adam Levermore). After applying the effect, we wound up with an awesome result.

After applying the halftone effect, we achieved this result:

And, we finally were able to save the file! Our final file weighs in at 2.61 GB. Admire it!

Conclusion

After seeing this, Caleb approved it. If you go back to the email conversations, you’ll realize that we’re fitting the scope we established at the beginning. We’re giving Caleb something that’s nature-themed, while still having our own stamp on it.

Phew. That was long. Well, it’s truly been a blast! We hope you followed until now, and that we could shine a little bit of light on how we do stuff.

Let us know if you have any suggestions, comments, or ideas on how to improve; or, you can send us love mail, hate mail, or ask us to design posters for you by letting us know in the comments below or just get in touch!