articles on
Hand Painted Signs by Jeff Canham
Jeff Canham is an artist and designer from Seattle who resides in San Francisco where he has his studio and makes amazing hand painted signs. I selected a few of his works for you to enjoy! For more from Jeff Canham visit jeffcanham.com.
Hand Painted Signs by Caetano Calomino
Caetano Calomino is a sign painter and illustrator from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Now days we live in a digital age and its very refreshing to see such great art work done by hand. I picked some awesome pieces from Caetano to inspire you to do something hand made. Enjoy! For more from Caetano Calomino visit Behance | Facebook | Instagram | Flickr.
Case Study - Vintage Neon Sign
Today I selected an amazing Case Study by the illustrator Michael Doret. He will take you on a detailed journey of how he designed this awesome Vintage Neon Sign for Sweet. Take a look step by step and follow the notes of the author for specific details. For more from Michael Doret visit michaeldoret.com and behance.net/MichaelDoret It was unanimously felt that this logo should resemble a classic theater marquee. I had an image in my head of what that might look like for this logo. But for something like this I always need do some research, to help me get the right attitude and not to just rely on my memory. There are some fantastic theater marquees in downtown Los Angeles (where I now live), but I found one that really was going in the direction I was visualizing in, of all places, Erie, Pennsylvania—The Warner: Although this marquee was a bit too intricate for my taste, and there was no neon (I must have the neon look in a marquee design!), I loved the whole sun-ray thing going on behind the letters, and decided that this marquee—although it would not be my only point of reference—would be my main inspiration point. So I started puttin my thoughts to paper: In the first rough above, I was heading in a direction, but still groping around for specifics. By the second rough, I was firmly on my way to solving the problem. And by the third rough, more or less nailed the basics of the design: At this point, the design was approved, and I went on to build the design in Illustrator. I do it in values of gray before assigning color, just so I know that certain shapes are separating from others properly. Below I’m building the graphic over a template of the rough pencil drawing (above). To be honest there were many, many more steps than what you see depocted below, but it would be impossible to show them all, and very difficult for a viewer to decipher exactly what’s going on. Suffice it to say that I built this art in layers, and in many ways it may have been similar to building an actual neon sign: I didn’t want to literally appropriate the color from the Warner marquee, so I started doing my own color solutions, but I didn’t think they worked the way I wanted them to: So I pretty much went back to a color palette more reminiscent of that Warner marquee: Building the art like a real sign apparently had its advantages because the client loved the art so much that he decided to have it made into a real lifesize neon sign for inside the store. To do this would be quite an elaborate project, and so the client and his Store Architect enlisted the services of SignMeister Robert M Fitch (who was already working on other signage in Sweet!) to oversee the implementation of this complicated project which included three types of sign illumination: chasing light bulbs, neon script and internal LED illumination. So together with Robert’s assistance I’ve put together a very abbreviated photographic synopsis of how this sign was assembled and finally installed in Sweet!. I think the sign really turned out well, and ended up looking surprisingly close to my graphic. This is what’s called open face channel lettering which, in the case of a connected script type, becomes a “sign can” which defines the letterform and houses the neon. It’s constructed from sheet metal, the returns (sides) are hand formed and welded to the letterform back plate. My Illustrator vector art was used to cut out the basic shapes. As in my art, the letters were formed out of only four separate pieces: Robert specified different colors for the inside and the outside of the can lettering. Here the different planes of the letters are being masked off and painted: Here the sign box in which everything goes is being created. The sheet metal sides are being pieced together, and you can see some of the specialized tools—the sign hammers—in the foreground: These are routed Sintra pieces that are applied to the sign face and perimeter details to help create dimension. The scale of the sign wasn’t large enough to form some of my details out of sheet metal, so this non-traditional material was used since the sign would only be used indoors: Robert designed and had fabricated side extensions for the marquee, nicely picking up some of the design elements of the sign graphic: When the sign’s neon and chase lights are illuminated, its color appearance changes dramatically: For more from Michael Doret visit michaeldoret.com and behance.net/MichaelDoret
Easy Casino Style Sign in Photoshop
A few weeks ago while walking on the streets of NYC, I saw this big billboard of a movie called Burlesque (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1126591/). What really caught my attention was the effect applied in the text, sort of those old signage that casinos used to have. I loved that effect and thought it would be a good exercise trying to do that in Photoshop. So in this tutorial I will show you how to create a very nice light effect using basic filters, layer style, blend modes and some stock photos. The whole process won't take you more than 45 minutes and the level of this tutorial is in my opinion easy, but it require some attention to the details. Step 1 Open Photoshop and create a new document, the size I'm using is 1113x1440 pixels. Make sure that the background is in black. After that add a text in a vertical order. The word I added is Abduzeedo and I used Arial Black for the font. Step 2 With the text layer selected go to Layer>Layer Style>Drop Shadow. Use the values below for the Drop Shadow. Step 3 Now to add some depth to the text use Inner Shadow first. Again use the values below to get the effect. Step 4 Let's use Bevel and Emboss to add some nice 3D effect to our text. Again follow the values below in order to achieve the same effect, or you can tweak them to see how that it would behave. Step 5 In case your text is not the sort of dark pink I'm using you can use Color Overlay to change that. The exact color I'm using is #b2355b. Step 6 Now let's add a stroke, again follow the values below and for the color, I used #6f0022. Step 7 Here is the effect you will get by using the layer style values from the previous steps. You can save that for future projects as well. Step 8 To create the light effects and give a more realistic feel I used a stock photo from where I copy just one light spot. The image I used is courtesy of Shutterstock and you can find it here. Step 9 Paste the light spot in your design and then start filling the letters with the lights. You can use smaller lights if you want make them 2 colums instead of one like I did. After that select all lights and merge them into one layer only (Layer>Merge Layers). Step 10 Select the lights layer and go to Layer>Layer Style>Drop Shadow. Use the values below for reference. Step 11 Now select Outer Glow. Again use the image below to get the right values. The whole idea of these two layer styles it to add a shadow so the lights will look more realistic and part of the image, and the same is for the outer glow. Step 12 Go to Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation. Click on Colorize and them change the Hue to pink. Step 13 Duplicate this layer and clean the drop shadow and outer glow effect. After that go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use 20 pixels for the Radius. Group this layer into a folder and change the folder's Blend Mode to Color Dodge. Step 14 With the Eraser Tool (E) and a very soft brush, resize it so it will be the size of the lights bulbs. Then with the blurry layer from the previous step selected start erasing some lights in order to make the signage less uniform, so there will be lights not so bright. That again will give more realism to the composition. Step 15 Back to our stock photo, courtesy of Shutterstock (http://shutterstock.com), select a burned light and copy it. Step 16 Paste the burned light bulb and then resize it so it will be the same size as the other ones. Duplicate it several times so in each letter there will be one or two lights not functioning. After you did that select all of them and merge them into a layer. Step 17 Go to Layer>Layer Style>Drop Shadow. Use the image below for the values of the drop shadow. Step 18 This is the effect we have gotten so far. Step 19 Let's add some flares as there is in the Burlesque poster I used for reference. The flares I'm using is from an image and you can download it here. After that resize the image and delete the other parts of it leaving just the flare itself. To make the colors match, go to Image>Adjustments>Hue and Saturation. Again select the Colorize option and change the hue to pink. This layer will use Screen for its Blend Mode. Duplicate the flares a few times and put them on top of certain letters. You can also rotate and resize them. Step 20 Now you can either duplicate the text and turn off all effects leaving it just with the pink color, then applying a Gaussian Blur to create a sort of pink glow behind the word or you can do that using the Bruth Tool (B) with pink. Both ways will work just fine. I did the first one, duplicating the word. Step 21 Now let's place a concrete texture as the background of our image. The texture I'm using is courtesy of Shutterstock and you can find it here. Step 22 Move the texture so it will be behind the black background. Then with the Eraser Tool (E) delete and a very soft brush with 20% opacity, start erasing the area over the text in order to show off the texture a little bit. Step 23 Select the texture layer and go to Layer>Layer Style>Color Overlay. Use pink for the color and Multiply for the Blend Mode. We are doing this in order to make the texture get the pink color, as it was being illumiated by the pink lights of the sign. Step 24 Select all layers and duplicate them, after that merge the copies into a new document, you can also do that using the keyboard shortcuts Command(mac)Control(pc) + Alt + Shift + E. After that go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use 20 pixels for the Radius. You will get a pretty blurry layer, so change the Blend Mode to Screen and the Opacity to 60%, that will create a really cool glowing effect. Conclusion In this tutorial we just played with layer styles and blend modes, mixing with some elements from real images in order to create some realism. The process is pretty straight forward and now you can apply that to your future projects or if you want you can go ahead and finish the Burlesque poster playing around with some photos of girls. Download the Photoshop file Click here to Download the Photoshop file used for this tutorial
Awesome Nostalgic Neon Signs
For me, one of the most nostalgic things there is, is neon signs, even if there's plenty of them everywhere. It just gives me this feeling that something has just traveled through time. I know that sounds crazy, but I bet many of you feel the same way. Neon signs are cool way to make your business look cooler, exactly for the reason I just gave... people like nostalgia. Anyways, I found lots of neon signs and would like to share them with you! I really hope you all enjoy my selection. Cheers! ;)