Salv's Sigs

[SalvIsWin]

I have a particular style that I always do, it's a bit different than what I've been seeing elsewhere in this thread and site. Here are two I did today:

All of the rest are older sigs. This Cloud one from Final Fantasy VII is one of my favourites, I think it was the first signature I ever did that looked similar to the outcome from the tutorial I was reading.

The rest of these signatures are for a group of friends I had back when I played Starcraft online competitively. So all the pictures were provided by them, but you can see the art style is pretty much the same through out.

This was one of my first attempts at using animation for the text. It's simple to do and I can explain how if any one is interested, it's all dumb with clipping masks and imageready. I made the shine come through very slowly though, so you have to wait for a moment before you'll see the white pass along the red lettering.

 

[The Doctor]

I knew I liked you.

I've repped you before, twice I believe, but I think now is as good a time as any to introduce myself. I'm Doc, and I run the show around here. (). I've noticed your great posts in the Cigar Lounge and your sig, and was hoping you'd post some more.

I cannot say anything about your sigs, as you obviously already have much experience. They are simply fantastic. The blending and colors are perfect, you have borders, and you don't muck about with text, so no problems there.

Since I can't give advice, I'll ask some questions:

How long have you been making sigs?

What are your preferred brush sets or techniques?

Have you written any tutorials?

I hope to see you around this section and the boards more often.

 

[SalvIsWin]

I knew I liked you.

I've repped you before, twice I believe, but I think now is as good a time as any to introduce myself. I'm Doc, and I run the show around here. (). I've noticed your great posts in the Cigar Lounge and your sig, and was hoping you'd post some more.

I cannot say anything about your sigs, as you obviously already have much experience. They are simply fantastic. The blending and colors are perfect, you have borders, and you don't muck about with text, so no problems there.

Since I can't give advice, I'll ask some questions:

How long have you been making sigs?

What are your preferred brush sets or techniques?

Have you written any tutorials?

I hope to see you around this section and the boards more often.

Thank you for the compliments, much appreciated. I've been creating signatures off and on for a few years, trying all sorts of styles, I particularly like animated signatures, but they aren't very popular so I usually create static images. I haven't written any tutorials, I've read and gone over tens of them in the past and picked up techniques here and there, which is usually why most of the signatures I create now have a similar style. Vector brushes are my preferred favourite, with grunge being a close second.

I welcome any advice from any one, including beginners. When it comes down to it, viewing an image and passing an opinion has nothing to do with photoshop, so if there is something that beginner user thinks looks off or odd, I always like to hear it, gives an opportunity to improve.

Some particular advice I would especially like is with text. I hate adding text, I always find it detracts from the image itself (not text in general, my text ), so I usually just refrain from adding any, but I know that it can be a great addition.

 

[The Doctor]

Adding text depends on the style of sig. For example, using my own work:

The text in this sig:

is different from the text in this sig:

...because they are of different styles. Your sigs are more like the first style, so I would suggest when adding text to use a font like Arial or Visitor, and making it a small size that is still readable. Adjusting the tracking is also useful when you only want to add single words. Remember that keeping it simple is usually the best. Using a white text set to Overlay is good, or duplicating said text, turning the bottom layer to black, and moving it a little to make an interesting depth effect. Or you can sample a color from the sig and give the text a stroke. Whatever makes you happy.

In the second style, text was a part of the focal point, so making it big and shiny was useful, and it fit Swagger's personality. Matching the personalityor style of the subject of your sig is quite good as well. When I make a Daniel Bryan sig, I usually stick to very straight-laced and serous fonts, like Arial or Lucida Sans.

However, some sigs just don't need text. The best thing to do is do whatever YOU think looks good.

 

[SalvIsWin]

...because they are of different styles. Your sigs are more like the first style, so I would suggest when adding text to use a font like Arial or Visitor, and making it a small size that is still readable. Adjusting the tracking is also useful when you only want to add single words. Remember that keeping it simple is usually the best. Using a white text set to Overlay is good, or duplicating said text, turning the bottom layer to black, and moving it a little to make an interesting depth effect. Or you can sample a color from the sig and give the text a stroke. Whatever makes you happy.

In the second style, text was a part of the focal point, so making it big and shiny was useful, and it fit Swagger's personality. Matching the personalityor style of the subject of your sig is quite good as well. When I make a Daniel Bryan sig, I usually stick to very straight-laced and serous fonts, like Arial or Lucida Sans.

However, some sigs just don't need text. The best thing to do is do whatever YOU think looks good.

The bolded part is what I have being lately. I like for the text to be unobtrusive and just to mark the signature so it's clear whose it is. I also like to mark them so that some one else cannot take it and pass it off as their own, although I suppose you could simply edit out the text, but then you might as well make you own sig.

One question, what do you mean by tracking? I underlined the sentence in question in the quote. Ninety percent of all signatures I have done have no text, so I'm not really experienced at all in that regard. A common problem I have is that when ever I go to add text, it looks very pixelated and I'm not sure why, the lettering doesn't look sharp or crisp.

Any idea why this is?

 

[The Doctor]

Tracking is the spacing between letters. You can edit the tracking by going to Window > Character. There are options in that window to edit spacing (both horizontal and vertical) as well as width and height of the text, along with other things. Extremely useful window to have docked to one of your palettes.

As for your text not being sharp or crisp...could you perhaps have accidentally turned anti-aliasing off? Next to where you adjust the size of the text, there's a menu with options like "Sharp", "Smooth", "Crisp", and "None". This adjust anti-aliasing or smoothing of your text. (I'm sure you know this already, just telling someone who may not). I usually use Sharp as my smoothing method. Makes the text look quite good. But if you use the Visitor font, which I believe is essential for all sig-makers and can be freely downloaded on dafont.com, you should make it small and turn off anti aliasing.

Here's a sig where I used said font and adjusted the tracking:

I made the letters slightly closer to each other, but adjusted the tracking on the space between "The" and "Miz" to separate the two words a little more until I got something I liked.

 

[SalvIsWin]

Thanks, I am going to use that font, it's perfect; small, unobtrusive and can be hidden on the sides, or in corners. I usually have my setting set to sharp as well, it just seems when I try generic fonts such as Arial they seem to be incredible pixelated, even when I look at the 100% size instead of a zoomed in version.

In any case, I am going to chalk up those problems to being the fonts I have tried, I'll download visitor and be done with it haha. I'll update the original post with some older signatures I have done, I have them saved on a disc.

EDIT: Updated OP with a lot more examples.

 

[The Doctor]

Glad to hear it. Visitor is a fantastic little blocky font, and my go-to one when I need something to be subtle yet good-looking. The best part about Visitor is that it works with basically any style.

When posting new sigs, be sure to include a description of how you did it or what your inspiration was. Don't want to get hit for spam.

 

[SalvIsWin]

Just finished with this sig:

It's one of my favourite ones, so I put it as my default signature. I used C4D's and vector brushes to get the different coloured lines. A trick you can do with brushes is to clip one brush on to another. So if you have a background layer (1), and two transparent layers above that (2) & (3), you can click layer (2) and use a brush. Next, hold alt and put your cursor between layers (2) and (3), and click. Layer (3) will become clipped to layer (2). What this means is that when you brush on layer (3) which is now clipped to layer (2), the brushing will only overlap on top of whatever layer (2) is. So if you simply put in a big circle in the middle for layer (2), and then you tried to brush on the corners for layer (3), nothing would happen, because it's not on that circle.

You can do some really cool effects when you do that, because you can essentially combine brushes. You can see a little bit of that at the bottom left of this signature, where you can see some circles that only appear on the purple lines and nothing else. I had clipped a layer on to another layer, which happened to have those purple lines, so that when I used a splatter brush, it only overlapped the other effect.

 

[The Doctor]

Very nice indeed, Salv. Believe it or not I have never thought to use a clipping mask to put brushes inside brushes. Will definitely have to try that out.

Awesome sig. The colors and lights work well together and it is just a nice piece of work. And I see you found the Vistor font. The text is placed well.

Good work.

 

[ABMorales787]

Damn. I'm gonna have to enroll myself in some graphic design classes. You're graphics are amazing. I do a mean border. That's about it. I've always loved messing around with the option and stuff, but I lack a lot of things to really get off the ground in graphics. I loved all the ones you showed off there. Fantastic work.

 

[SalvIsWin]

I have two links to tutorials that I used to use about a year ago. At this point I have done so many signatures of this style that I remember all the tricks and steps, so I don't have to follow them any more, I can just add what's needed, whether it's from one tutorial, another, or a new one. The two links are:

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs18/f/2007/130/7/7/Full_Signature_Tutorial_by_Senthrax.jpg

&

http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs18/f/2007/146/7/9/Metroid_Signature_Tutorial_by_MPCoyote.jpg

Overall the second link is an easier tutorial to follow, but as long as you know the tools of photoshop and how they generally work, you can just follow the steps and come out with a pretty decent outcome. Of course, it's a completely different style overall.

One of the differences I've seen with signatures here is that since this is a wrestling forum, many of the signatures involve wrestlers, and the popular renders or photos seem to ones where the wrestler is standing still or posing. Using the styles above, you need to have an action photo, where something is happening, or what's called 'flow'.

For example, in my signature, before I even started, I knew which way all the graphics would be flowing because of the picture. That render of the storm-trooper is clearly bottom-left to top-right. If I had made parrallel lines or vertical lines, you would see that the signature wouldn't look quite right. One piece of advice I would give actually is to try to use renders where they are in mid-punch/kick/manuever. I might even try my hand at it to give an example.

______________

Update: I tried my hand at a wrestling sig, as this is a wrestling website, but I had a hard time. I couldn't find any good renders of Bret Hart in an action shot, so I settled for Randy Orton with a psychotic look on his face. There isn't any action in the shot, so I just focussed on making Orton look as crazy as I possibly could with out going too over the top.

I find that it's hard to do signatures with wrestlers because they don't have much colour on them, its usually their tights and skin tones. It's hard to come up with a colour flow because you essentially have to put your own colours in and try to match the render somehow. Orton just turned out looking rather orange, but it's the only solution I could think of, other than having him stick out.

I don't really do signatures for other people, I find it really difficult to get behind my own work and feel good about what I'm producing when the renders and colour choices aren't made by me. Any time I ever do requests I usually only let the person pick the character in question, and then I scour websites and do all the creative aspects myself. No one really wants that, but it's the only way I can feel good about the signatures I produce, that's also why I have a lot of respect for those who take requests all the time. It's hard to get behind work in which you don't like it's creative direction, but for those who can do it and do it consistently, I tip my hat.

In any case, the wizard signature, link signature (first page, first post) and this Orton signature I'm not using obviously and since I created them recently I have the .psd files, so if any one wants either of the three I could probably add some text to either (would be small visitor font), or do some minor, minor changes if you'd like, let me know.

 

[SalvIsWin]

I did a new signature today with animation.

I didn't make it animation that noticeable, but it's a little touch that you can do for your signatures. If you notice, the markings on Illidan's arms, and his two eyes both glow stronger and weaker in succession.

It's very simple to do, and for certain signatures it can add something extra. Some people think it's looks tacky or corny, but I disagree. It's not something that should always been done, and I think the problem is that some people add it to everything when it doesn't even make sense.

If any one is interested I can explain how it's done, I've seen a few signatures where I think some animation could have really added. You can make things glow, you can have text or what ever 'slide' into the signature, there's quite a bit you can do if you're creative.

 

[The Doctor]

That would be fantastic if you could put the tutorial in the Sig Making Guides thread. Animated signatures aren't allowed on WZ but it is always good to add a new technique in one's arsenal. I really like that sig and the effect and I could definitely incorporate it in one of my graphics in the future.

Also, those tutorials were very useful. I used techniques learned in them for my current sig. Thanks for posting them!

 

[SalvIsWin]

I will post a short tutorial about it in the guides thread. In the mean time, am I allowed to have the picture itself in this thread, just not as a signature? It would be hard to post a tutorial without showing a finished product, or steps of how it will look at different stages.

 

[The Doctor]

Yes. The only thing that is against the rules is having it as your signature itself. Graphics posted in the main forums can be of any size, animated or non, and of any subject. If there is a graphic you are particularly proud of that isn't a sig, feel free to post it.

I look forward to your tutorial. It is a VERY nice sig.