Drop Shadow SUPER HACK Tutorial + The Rings of Power Hair Brush!!???

Hi everyone - New Photoshop tutorial prerelease!

I love it when this happens… I recently took on a project that required REALLY pushing the boundaries of layer style effects and ended up having a few Photoshop revelations.

Here's one... the live adjustable cast shadow!

It’s a simple, classic graphic style, but I found that when you actually have control over a cast shadow, you can use it to create all kinds of interesting effects.

Am I the only one who didn’t realize you could do this!? Anxious to hear what you guys think!

VIEW ON TEXTURELABS 

VIEW ON YOUTUBE 

Plus... THE RINGS OF POWER

A VERY EXCITING project for me finally saw the light of day last week. A few months ago, Adobe reached out and invited me to create the new splash screen (the artwork that shows when the program is loading) for Adobe InDesign.

As part of their partnership with Amazon and the new Lord Of the Rings: The Rings Of Power series, I created a line engraved illustration of one of the characters from the series.

Is that the Texturelabs “Magic Engraving Texture”? YUP! I used the engraving pattern technique to generate the shading, but applied it to individual elements, adjusting the angle of the engraving and adjusting the shading. A lot of additional line work and layout in Illustrator - the most difficult element was the hair (this character has some awesome wild hair). I ended up creating a few custom brushes in Illustrator to paint the hair.

I’ll attach the Illustrator brushes below if you want to give them a shot! I can’t guarantee you’ll get instant results, but they’ve been pretty fun to experiment with.

Check out the splash screen art with the latest update of InDesign - though it pops on the screen and is gone in about .5 seconds!

Hope all is well with you - putting together a monthly texture update that I’ll send out tomorrow - including a few new collage textures…

Thanks!

Brady