- Aug 21, 2007
- 33,321
- 110,538
- AFL Club
- Port Adelaide
- Other Teams
- Aston Villa, San Antonio Spurs
Greetings all. I had magpienato ask me for some advice on how I put together my NAFL templates this year, so I figured i'd post up my process as a thread.
Firstly, I used a Wacom drawing tablet heavily for this, and i'm not sure i'd have been able to achieve it with a mouse. It certainly would have been much, much more time consuming, and it took countless hours over months as it was.
Secondly, i've never been good at drawing. If you're good at drawing and/or you've had a lot of experience in life drawing, this will all come a lot more naturally to you than it did to me and you'll be able to do a far better job. My first few attempts at this were pretty bad and it was only through a lot of practice that it got to a level that I was happy with.
It's important to start with a large, crisp base image. Use the advanced google image search (which you can find by googling advanced image search) and search for images of 4mp or larger, and you want something that is really crisp and in focus.
I'm not going to go into insane detail here, because it's important that you play around with photoshop and try to find different ways to solve problems.
Start by simply tracing the outline of your base image guernsey with the pen tool. If you don't use the pen tool a lot, this is good practice.
Trace shapes for your collar and cuffs, and as you can see i've done a shape for the back part of the guernsey behind the side seam here. Use drop shadows and inner glows in the blending tools to show a bit of depth and differentiate the collar and cuffs from the main body of the guernsey.
Add in some stitching. I do this by drawing paths with the pen tool, making a dashed brush and using the stroke path function at the bottom of the paths list. I duplicated my layers and separated them slightly, with the higher layer white and the lower layer black to give it some depth and make it work on any colour base.
I gave my guernsey a light meshy fabric type texture as a pattern in the blending options, I just found this made it look more like fabric and not too smooth.
Start by adding the large general shadows created by stadium floodlighting. I have a layer for shadow and a layer for highlights so I can edit them as I please. You can basically trace this off of the base image. Adjust the hardness and size of your brush as you go to make this as close to the base image as you can. It took me forever, so be patient.
Keep playing around with it to get the contours of the body as best you can. Use the eraser as well as a brush, and make heavy use of the smudge tool to make it blend as seamlessly as you can. This took me a lot of practice. A great tip I got from Dylan8 while learning this is to not fall into the trap of making your shadows too light or starting shadows from a medium gray base. If there is no light, a shadowed area should be black, and erase away from there.
Now add some general highlights. These are as important as the shadows to create depth. Follow the base image and try to copy as best you can remembering to adjust the hardness of your white brush as needed to keep it blending in well with the rest of your guernsey.
This is where it gets really, really time consuming. Start adding shadows and highlights for the folds in the guernsey. I did this by having a layer for shadows and a layer for highlights and doing the shadow of each fold first and then the highlight. Use a black brush for the shadows and use the smudge tool to blend it into the guernsey.
This took countless hours of trial and error, including lots of complete restarts. Do small sections of the guernsey at a time and focus on getting them as perfect as you can. Patience is the key here. Try to follow the base image as best you can. The undo button on my Wacom tablet got a fair workout.
This image shows the highlight layer added to my shadow layer. Even after all this time and so many hours and revisions, the only section on this guernsey i'm really happy with is the bottom left part as you look at it. The rest could all be re-done if I had the time and patience.
I can't really give you much better advice regarding drawing, it's not a strength of mine. Wish i'd paid some attention in art class.
Next I add in the logos. I find positioning the logos first (based on where the logos are on the base image) gives a good frame for the guernsey and helps you to line up your design later. Make your logos smart objects and then use the warp transform tool to get them into the right shape based on the contours of your guernsey.
Add your design. I always do my designs in a flat rectangle in a separate document, and them add that entire flat design in as a smart object, so I can use the warp transform tool to get it to fit with my guernsey.
To finish off here i've added little shapes to the design to help the actual design of the guernsey follow the folded ripples i've made, which hopefully makes it look a bit more realistic. You can see how it's changed the line of the yellow part.
Just to show you how I developed over time, here are a couple of examples of earlier drafts of the shadow and highlight layers, the earlier one is on the right. Basically everything was redone, but I got better as I spent time on it.
Thanks for reading! I hope people learned something or have a different way of looking at things, even if they don't intend to try the same sort of template themselves. Remember a lot of what i've done here is building on over a decade of mucking around designing guernseys and working on templates on this board. I definitely think people with a drawing background will be able to do the highlights and shadows much, much better than I did, it was all very new to me.
Firstly, I used a Wacom drawing tablet heavily for this, and i'm not sure i'd have been able to achieve it with a mouse. It certainly would have been much, much more time consuming, and it took countless hours over months as it was.
Secondly, i've never been good at drawing. If you're good at drawing and/or you've had a lot of experience in life drawing, this will all come a lot more naturally to you than it did to me and you'll be able to do a far better job. My first few attempts at this were pretty bad and it was only through a lot of practice that it got to a level that I was happy with.
It's important to start with a large, crisp base image. Use the advanced google image search (which you can find by googling advanced image search) and search for images of 4mp or larger, and you want something that is really crisp and in focus.
I'm not going to go into insane detail here, because it's important that you play around with photoshop and try to find different ways to solve problems.
Start by simply tracing the outline of your base image guernsey with the pen tool. If you don't use the pen tool a lot, this is good practice.
Trace shapes for your collar and cuffs, and as you can see i've done a shape for the back part of the guernsey behind the side seam here. Use drop shadows and inner glows in the blending tools to show a bit of depth and differentiate the collar and cuffs from the main body of the guernsey.
Add in some stitching. I do this by drawing paths with the pen tool, making a dashed brush and using the stroke path function at the bottom of the paths list. I duplicated my layers and separated them slightly, with the higher layer white and the lower layer black to give it some depth and make it work on any colour base.
I gave my guernsey a light meshy fabric type texture as a pattern in the blending options, I just found this made it look more like fabric and not too smooth.
Start by adding the large general shadows created by stadium floodlighting. I have a layer for shadow and a layer for highlights so I can edit them as I please. You can basically trace this off of the base image. Adjust the hardness and size of your brush as you go to make this as close to the base image as you can. It took me forever, so be patient.
Keep playing around with it to get the contours of the body as best you can. Use the eraser as well as a brush, and make heavy use of the smudge tool to make it blend as seamlessly as you can. This took me a lot of practice. A great tip I got from Dylan8 while learning this is to not fall into the trap of making your shadows too light or starting shadows from a medium gray base. If there is no light, a shadowed area should be black, and erase away from there.
Now add some general highlights. These are as important as the shadows to create depth. Follow the base image and try to copy as best you can remembering to adjust the hardness of your white brush as needed to keep it blending in well with the rest of your guernsey.
This is where it gets really, really time consuming. Start adding shadows and highlights for the folds in the guernsey. I did this by having a layer for shadows and a layer for highlights and doing the shadow of each fold first and then the highlight. Use a black brush for the shadows and use the smudge tool to blend it into the guernsey.
This took countless hours of trial and error, including lots of complete restarts. Do small sections of the guernsey at a time and focus on getting them as perfect as you can. Patience is the key here. Try to follow the base image as best you can. The undo button on my Wacom tablet got a fair workout.
This image shows the highlight layer added to my shadow layer. Even after all this time and so many hours and revisions, the only section on this guernsey i'm really happy with is the bottom left part as you look at it. The rest could all be re-done if I had the time and patience.
I can't really give you much better advice regarding drawing, it's not a strength of mine. Wish i'd paid some attention in art class.
Next I add in the logos. I find positioning the logos first (based on where the logos are on the base image) gives a good frame for the guernsey and helps you to line up your design later. Make your logos smart objects and then use the warp transform tool to get them into the right shape based on the contours of your guernsey.
Add your design. I always do my designs in a flat rectangle in a separate document, and them add that entire flat design in as a smart object, so I can use the warp transform tool to get it to fit with my guernsey.
To finish off here i've added little shapes to the design to help the actual design of the guernsey follow the folded ripples i've made, which hopefully makes it look a bit more realistic. You can see how it's changed the line of the yellow part.
Just to show you how I developed over time, here are a couple of examples of earlier drafts of the shadow and highlight layers, the earlier one is on the right. Basically everything was redone, but I got better as I spent time on it.
Thanks for reading! I hope people learned something or have a different way of looking at things, even if they don't intend to try the same sort of template themselves. Remember a lot of what i've done here is building on over a decade of mucking around designing guernseys and working on templates on this board. I definitely think people with a drawing background will be able to do the highlights and shadows much, much better than I did, it was all very new to me.
