I know I said that I would give you an eBook, but I need some more time than I currently have to produce something worth blogging about. So instead, I watched a tutorial on Lynda.com called Deke's Techniques to set up layer styles that mimic gold and silver. The text is still editable, which is really nice, although I have to readjust some of the sparkles if I move the text. I think it will be very useful for projects in the future. Deke only showed how to do the gold lettering; I then monkeyed with the style to get the silver coloring (not too hard). Stay tuned for eBooks hopefully next week.

All right, I know it's Thursday night, but I had a lot of fun tweaking this tutorial. The grass, the caterpillar, and part of the sky are from my in-law's place (which is very beautiful), the road is from a trail my husband and I like to visit in Virginia, and the other part of the sky (the sunset part) is from Cinque Terre, Italy. The rest are images I found online. The original tutorial can be found here. People have done some other clever things with this concept. I think I am a surrealist at heart.

My goal is to do a tutorial a week. This is hard for me because I can spend hours and hours on just one project trying to make it better. So these shorter tutorials and not-perfect tutorials will be better for me. This is how to do a content-aware fill in CS5. It can save me tons of time.

It's just a few clicks to do this: Use the magnetic lasso tool, Edit-->Fill, then clean up with the spot healing brush (J) and the clone tool (which is a million times better in CS5 than in CS3). It's not perfect (I'd fix the bottom of the pillow more), but I learned how to use it and I have a pillow ready for the next display. Pretty neat. I wonder what the algorithm in the programming is for this.

This tutorial (from here) was the most time- and layer-intense tutorial I've ever done. I learned a ton about different modes, especially Overlay. Many layers were duplicated and then had different modes applied to them. Especially useful in this tutorial was juggling the amount of layers I needed to create certain effects. The tutorial incorporated Adobe Illustrator as well (for the blast mark and the grid). Since I am weak in the Illustrator area it was helpful. I admit that after awhile I completely deviated from the original tutorial, making this poster into a vague commentary either about 1) NASA bombing the moon for "research" purposes, or 2) the recent kerfuffle over cutting the US space program. But it was mostly fun. Unfortunately, this blog doesn't allow huge file uploads, so a lot of the finer detail is washed out. But perhaps it adds to the retro-ness of it all.