Time Created: March 2005
It’s my 550th post today. Go me!
So to celebrate, I’m pulling out one of my older pieces, more specifically one of the oldest pieces I still solidly like.
This was made back when I was first wrapping my brain around Photoshop and this whole “digital art” thing. It would be five years until I purchased my tablet, and even working with a mouse was challenging. So I was mainly sticking to basic shapes and following tutorials and the like.
One of those tutorials was how to make planets out of simple texture editing. I was also playing with such advanced stuff as *gasp* embossing!
…Yes, I know that’s a one or two click thing, but still, that was pretty advanced for me at the time. I even made a border around shapes and embossed THAT! I was getting really fancy!
But it’s not the technical skills I still like, but some of the design choices. The font choice, color, and background all add a, shall we say, paleofuturistic flare to the piece. In other words, it evokes the idea of what the future looked like when I was younger. Green text on black backgrounds was high scale future tech once, you know!
I also liked the subtle effects I added to the display screen. I thought back and forth on that lens flare, you know. They’re misused in so many places you know. But here, you’d expect there to be a camera taking this picture before it was put on the display screen! And it’d probably still use lenses, too!
But my absolute favorite aspect you probably can’t really see. I added scan lines to the display screen. Talk about paleofuturism! Scan lines were once a symbol of modern screens. They were barely visible horizontal lines that moved up and down the computer or TV screen, refreshing the image. They were on their way out when I was quite young, but I still think of scan lines when I want to show that it’s a display screen and not, say, a window. Technically, they’re still used today. The process has just become so quick and subtle that the human eye can’t catch it.
Cameras can, though. Try taking a picture of your computer monitor sometime. It helps to put up a pure white background to really see it. You’ll see a perfectly white image on your camera’s preview image, but once it’s taken, things will turn out quite different! It’ll be all wavy multicolored lines and the like! It’s awesome!
