◄ | Nat's GFX Gallery | ► NEW 9/20

[Dinosaurz]

Hmm, the fact that they switched over to something more horror-esque definitely sounds promising. What I did like about Teen Wolf was that every episode didn't drag on for too long and there was always something interesting, but I also noticed that they've been trying to add so much extra stuff to the plot too. That makes for a pretty convulsed show, unfortunately :-/
At least the audience never gets too bored, though. Lol.



Yeah, I definitely agree with you; S3 was the best, since the plot started picking up around that time iirc and some cool characters were introduced. But then again, anything beats how cringeworthy S1 was x_x
I'm vowing to never speak about S1 again.

Spoiler: Aiden spoilers

It definitely sucked that Aiden died... was he your favorite character?? Seems like it, haha.
To be completely honest, I didn't feel much at all during his death scene. But that's because I'm biased; Allison was my second favorite character and she died because almost every character I like dies :-[

Yeah, him and Ethan. . But it's fine, I can just cry here. Alone. I didn't feel much for Allison cause I thought she was bipolar. One second she be killing everyone and then the next they are best buds?

 

[Pokemanz]

Season 3 was definitely the best, specifically 3B imo. I was really upset when Allison died but it's like... it wasn't all that bad, y'know? Mainly because she was just a friend at that point and Scott had already moved on. Now if they had been together still...

And omg don't even get me started on season 1. I missed half of it because I was like 13 and didn't understand TV schedules. Now there's just no way I can bring myself to go back and watch the beginning. ;-;

 

[derezzed]

Yeah, him and Ethan. . But it's fine, I can just cry here. Alone. I didn't feel much for Allison cause I thought she was bipolar. One second she be killing everyone and then the next they are best buds?

LOL. I just had a good laugh at this, mainly because what you said is pretty much true

Season 3 was definitely the best, specifically 3B imo. I was really upset when Allison died but it's like... it wasn't all that bad, y'know? Mainly because she was just a friend at that point and Scott had already moved on. Now if they had been together still...

And omg don't even get me started on season 1. I missed half of it because I was like 13 and didn't understand TV schedules. Now there's just no way I can bring myself to go back and watch the beginning. ;-;

Oh my god dude, you missed absolutely nothing. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Compared to the other seasons, S1 might as well disappear. It wouldn't and shouldn't be missed, because it's just so bad, and not even in a good way either.

I could honestly talk crap about season one of Teen Wolf all day, but I'll stop here; I don't want to turn your gallery thread into the Teen Wolf talk show, Pokemanz. Even though it's probably too late.
So in an attempt to get back on topic, I'm finally getting around to giving some c+c on the banners you posted a while ago: (x).

This is definitely overdue, but that aside, I really like the brushes you used; while I can't say much about that aspect of the banners (since I rarely use brushes myself), the brushwork really does make the graphics a lot more interesting and eye-catching! Especially in the first version, I have to say. I spent a good few minutes staring at the background... the color scheme drew me in too. But the problem with this is that the images on the left and right were only an afterthought, when they should be the main focal points. This is because they blended in with the background too much. Granted, blending your top image(s) with the background is normally good, but the purpose of this is to make the finished product look cohesive - that's successful blending. If, in a work, the top images are suppressed rather than enhanced by blending, you can automatically tell that the maker fell victim to the 'bad type' of blending. You know? I hope that made sense, haha.

Also, I have a bit of a suggestion for you. Maybe try filling up space with text vertically instead of horizontally? A little thing I noticed is that you tend to keep your text in longer lines rather than breaking them up into shorter lines. Of course, this definitely isn't a negative thing, but both text styles work out differently for different graphics. In the future, I'd recommend switching between those two text styles and determining what looks better :-]

My internet access literally gave up on me just as I was about to post this a while ago but fortunately a Restore Auto-Saved Content button exists and I have honestly never been more grateful for it in my life, RIP me and my long as hell critique

 

[Pokemanz]

Here's something I did today: glow text!

Learned it from a tutorial that was surprisingly easy to follow.
Now I'm going to attempt to do this multiple times on a new piece...​

-snip-

LOL I honestly don't mind the discussion here, but if you want we can move to VM or something. xD

Thanks for the critique! I took a background I found on Google and applied some brush techniques I learned recently to give it a "glass" feel. My main idea was to have the images "fade" into the background as if they were a part of it- like a reflection or simply a design. I guess I could have increased their opacities just a bit since I honestly just clicked on the bar for a random number.

As for text, I never know what I should be doing with it. I usually just have it in longer lines since a more vertical style make it feel "squished" in my opinion. I guess I should just move it around here and there to see if I can find a new way to make it work!

 

[Pokemanz]

New banner I finished yesterday!

I'm actually very proud of the edits done to the background since those turned out so well. I used the advice given to me in the other thread and was able to make the fractals/lighting effects transparent (never knew it was that easy wow) and apply some to this piece. Not much, just some balls of light above the trees and a lens flare that shines through the trees.
As for the text, I had no idea what I should do with it considering this was such a detailed background. I took some advice from earlier and stacked the text vertically as opposed to horizontally like I normally do. It looked better in my opinion.

I'm sure I'll improve on text and other things in time, for now I just need to practice.​

 

[derezzed]

^ I'm assuming you're talking about GIMP's "Color to Alpha" trick? If so, I'm glad you're putting it to good use ;-]
Honestly speaking, a day doesn't go by where I don't congratulate my younger self for coming across that feature a few years back. It makes rendering easy as pie and sometimes I laugh thinking about how many people are missing out on it

That aside, I think the background piece is super nice. I rarely see spark brushes used well (those are spark brushes, correct?) but they look quite nice here and they match the Bill T-shirt on top of that, haha.
Text looks nice too. You did a good job with it :-]

The only thing I have a nitpick about is the render placement (along with the drop shadow, which has a cut-off left hand). I'm not going to say anything about that though, because things were most likely requested to be placed that way.

 

[Pokemanz]

-snip-

Yep your color to Alpha advice was perfect. Two clicks and the thing is transparent. It's amazing!
And they're not brushes actually, they're light textures from a pack I picked up. Unless that's what you mean, lol

And yep the render was requested to be placed like that. Had to add the dual shadow on both sides to keep it from blending in. I'll admit it doesn't look too nice.

 

[Pokemanz]

Boop!

 

[Pokemanz]

New banner wip thing!

Look at how it blends omg I'm so proud.
Thing is you can tell it severely lost quality when I resized it...​

 

[Pokemanz]

Made a new banner to match my avatar!

Quite proud of it, although I really wish the render was a bit more clear. I tried upping brightness and saturation but that barely did anything, so I settled with eroding the lines.
Also text omg somebody help me I need to figure out how to text because I like can't even text right now. It always looks awkward or out of place and I hate it. .-.​

 

[derezzed]

Made a new banner to match my avatar!

Quite proud of it, although I really wish the render was a bit more clear. I tried upping brightness and saturation but that barely did anything, so I settled with eroding the lines.
Also text omg somebody help me I need to figure out how to text because I like can't even text right now. It always looks awkward or out of place and I hate it. .-.​

Text actually looks fine to me; there's variation and I like the fact that you slanted some words to add impact. I'd just suggest moving it closer to the render :-]

But yeah, the render's coloring is pretty murky and way too monotone. Mind linking me to the original? If possible, I'll see what I can do to make it lighter and then tell you about the process afterwards.

 

[Pokemanz]

Text actually looks fine to me; there's variation and I like the fact that you slanted some words to add impact. I'd just suggest moving it closer to the render :-]

But yeah, the render's coloring is pretty murky and way too monotone. Mind linking me to the original? If possible, I'll see what I can do to make it lighter and then tell you about the process afterwards.

At first I had all of the text slanted and this and that but it just looked too weird for me. In the end I just settled for the two but for whatever reason rotating the text reduces its quality.

It actually isn't even a render, I had to render it myself. It was easy though considering how dark it is. Here's the original!

 

[derezzed]

Just got around to messing with the pic, and here's my conclusion: lightening it was pretty easy (I'll briefly outline the process later on); the only hard part was adding color.

And with this piece in particular, it's only really possible to make it monocolor (which you already have). So I'll cut it short today and leave you with this- with monocoloring there's always this requirement to make the coloring look dynamic so it's interesting and distracts the viewer from the lack of color. To do that, you basically pile on a ton of textures, and once you have some other colors there, you go crazy with all those adjustments you have at your disposal and hope for the best.

There's no science to it really; here's a step-by-step (of sorts) of what I did-
(Imgur uploaded them as .JPGs so bear with the quality here)

Spoiler: click

original, unedited image

added the initial lightening adjustments
(I mainly duplicated the layer and inverted it, setting it to Soft Light. Then I applied a Levels afterward to get some of the contrast back, by sliding the rightmost and leftmost sliders to where the bump starts and ends.)

The drawing gives off an intense feel, so I chose a random nebula stock I had in my folders and added it on top, layer mode Screen.

To add a more dynamic vibe to everything, I spammed gradients on Soft Light, and messed around with adjustments. The last one was a Brightness/Contrast adjustment, at +150 Brightness. I set it to 70%. This layer is honestly the main contributor in lightening the image, though the steps I took before it were useful as well.

Hope this helps :-]

 

[Pokemanz]

-snip-

You always seem to make everything work! Very nice!

Seems easy enough. I had thought about adding some effects over the image but felt like the ones I had were "too much" and didn't really fit the piece too well. I'll definitely try this out if I run into something a bit dark!

Also I should look up some more fire-like fractals because I'm having so much fun using those.

 

[Cam1]

You always seem to make everything work! Very nice!

Seems easy enough. I had thought about adding some effects over the image but felt like the ones I had were "too much" and didn't really fit the piece too well. I'll definitely try this out if I run into something a bit dark!

Also I should look up some more fire-like fractals because I'm having so much fun using those.

Since you mentioned what you have, I just wanted to mention something. For things like Bokeh (all the time) and textures (most of the time), I just google them with a basic description of what I have. Also, for fractals, go for greentunic on Deviantart. He has the best (derezzed may have already told you about him lmao).

 

[Pokemanz]

Since you mentioned what you have, I just wanted to mention something. For things like Bokeh (all the time) and textures (most of the time), I just google them with a basic description of what I have. Also, for fractals, go for greentunic on Deviantart. He has the best (derezzed may have already told you about him lmao).

Yeah I have all of greentunic's packs already haha I love em. Thanks for the tip!

 

[Pokemanz]

New banner in progress! I'm kinda excited for this one but I'm not too happy with it right now.

It reminds me of a really old one I did back in like March.

So far I've tinted the render so it matches the background and mimics some sort of lighting and blurred the background. I also sharpened the render since it got pretty blurry after resizing. I felt like I needed to expand the canvas since I couldn't find a position in the frame that I liked. It felt like either Alex's head was getting cut off or Nathan was too low at the bottom. Making the thing smaller only made it look worse. It also looked strange at the very edge, so I blurred Nathan's leg in order to move it over. I think I might try out some wireframe C4Ds (or something similar) for this, and maybe, just maybe, some little forest glow light effects, although I probably won't since I doubt they'd fit in here. I'll be using this render in a few other pieces so I'd very much like to hear some opinions on how I should go about using it!

Also as a side note, I'm once again using PSP8 for most of my work. I'm using GIMP for the cta trick as well as a few other things like effects and whatnot, but things like blending and rearranging I find are easier on PSP, just because I know how to use it. Plus I use the change to color brush for almost everything so I can blend stuff into the background. I'm also using the online image editor site when I need to resize stuff because rather than pixelating everything it makes the lines nice and smooth. Just thought I'd share what I'm currently using, so far it's working out pretty well!​

 

[Pokemanz]

Finished piece! I am totally happy with the way it turned out.

Filter version:

Same principle as my last one in terms of message, just a bit better since it's of my OCs. I recently made a thread asking if anyone could color my favorite ship art piece and got lots of different styles, so I figured I'd practice GFX with them! I mean, it goes with Halloween, right?
I used lots of tinting and light effects for this. I also found some swirls and added them as if they were vines in the forest. Text was probably the most difficult part but overall I'm very happy with how everything turned out.

I'd love to hear opinions, as always!​

 

[cherriielle]

Finished piece! I am totally happy with the way it turned out.

Filter version:

Same principle as my last one in terms of message, just a bit better since it's of my OCs. I recently made a thread asking if anyone could color my favorite ship art piece and got lots of different styles, so I figured I'd practice GFX with them! I mean, it goes with Halloween, right?
I used lots of tinting and light effects for this. I also found some swirls and added them as if they were vines in the forest. Text was probably the most difficult part but overall I'm very happy with how everything turned out.

I'd love to hear opinions, as always!​

Very nice! Everthing blends together smoothly, and the text placement is spot on!

 

[Kairi-Kitten]

Wow those really came out nicely 8 )