Insignia

[Yandor]

So... I got bored, and started to mess with the whole "coat of arms" idea. Well this is the result, I don't know if I could consider it a shield, or an insignia, or for that matter just a coin... Eh I donno but comments, ideas, etc would be great.

But I do plan on using them or something very close, like Anna did in her Greyhawk work

[Yandor]

So I realized after I posted, that this should probably be in mapping elements, guess its more of a symbol then anything... if so please move =D

[The Cartographist]

Whether it is a shield, a symbol, or a coin, I really like it.

How did you produce it? A brief tutorial would be much appreciated.

Great work!

[Yandor]

Well heres a shot with out pictures pure explaination in a few simple(maybe? =P) stages

All photoshop

stages 1 - Basic structure
254 x 254 image filled black, created a circle 250x250 and filled 50% gray(on orignal layer), create new layer repeat the circle proccess just make sure the new circle is about so 248x248. This should leave you with a circle just smaller then the orignal circle, I then use the magic wand, inverse selection, and then click the black background while holding alt (make sure your on the orignal layer) Now you should have a nice ring selection, fill with 50% gray. Then I copied the layer and ctrl+t (transform?) grabbed the corner and shrunk it down to make a second ring, and merged the 2 ring layers. I grabbed the magic wand selected the area inbetween and went up to select->modify->expand 1px then on a new layer filled in the selection with 50% grey. So now you should have a layer with 2 small rings and a layer with a fat ring, make sure the small rings are on top and on the small rings apply a layer style with Outer glow change opacity to 100%, change color to a darker gray color (I did #373737), technique precise, and size 2. Also apply stroke, px 1, outside, opacity 100% and the same dark grey color from outer shadow. Now duplicate the 2 rings layer and now you should have the basic outline.

stage 2- Grundge brushes (I guess abstract brushes could work)
Well, many might not know the "signature" technique, its usually the forum signatures with the crazy background and some person in the middle (generally from a video game) anyways you can find grundge brushes from www.deviantart.com or I'll just load up the ones I used.
Anyways for the fun part, once you use find the brushes, make 4 new layers, all soft light as the blend mode, and have your foreground and background as black and white. Now the brushes are bigger then the image so just shrink them, but some look good as black and others good as white, so test them out a little. Now first layer (bottom most layer) start off with black, just spot the entire grey area, no fill, no heavy brushing just a few here and there mostly where the shadow will be when you do the lighting. Now go to the second layer and change color to white and do what you did before. Now on the last two layers do the same as the first 2, 1 black layer 1 white layer. Depending on how you get it to work, you can mess with the opacity of the brushes so you don't get such a wide range of colors, but what I ended up doing is going in the middle of the 4 layers and added another layer with the 50% color and brushed in to neutralized the colors, so there wasn't to many extremes in black and white. Now merge all those layers together including your background. So now you should have your background with the textured middle circle, and an outside ring which is 3 layers. (4 in all)

stage 3- Filters
easiest stage, I'm sure you could merge the ring layers together at this point, but I don't know if the results are the same... but needless to say I did these steps on all the ring layers. First noise->add noise, 6amount, uniform, mono. then go into render->lighting effects, use the spot light and angle it to the top left, make sure the 2 sides of the spot light are on the outside of your entire square/image (make sure you adjust it so its not so bright). I then repeated the lighting step on the background layer. And thats your entire outer look of it all.

Stage 3.5- styles I forgot about
After you merge your rings together, you should only have your background image and the ring layers. duplicate your ring layer and on the first ring layer (by first I mean the bottom one)blend mode Overlay, drop shadow 100% opacity, 120 degree no global light (no check) distance 5, size 32(yes 32 gives a nice black ring of black in the middle), Inner shadow -60 degree no global light, distance 5 size 7. Bevel, inner bevel, smooth, 120 degree, no global 30 dgree alt, highlight screen 60% opacity, and shadow 0% opacity.
Now for the second layer the same as the first layer, but blend mode Soft Light

stage 4- color and center icon
I have created and found a ton of tribal tattoos and they work great for this. www.deviantart.com has tons of them. Anyway use color balance (ctrl B), not the mask color balance, but use it on the background layer to get a general color, I used orange. then I repeated on the rings then I copied over the pheonix tattoo thing and colored it too (when I copied it over I ran into the problem of the main image being grey with a white frindge, I just used my magic wand and selected the area outside my image (so just the blank area) and got as close to the grey as possible without selecting the grey, then I went up to select->modify->expand px 1. Then hit inverse selection and colored in the entire image. Yes yes it is very blocky and some images can look like crap after wards) Alright so thats how its done, I added on a style I made a long time ago for some texted on the image, and that gave me the bubbled image.

So yeah that should be the entire thing, the tricky part is to get stage 2 to come together, an idea might be to use the 50% grey instead of black, so you can get a more even color... But yeah its not to hard, its just take a little tinkering time, and some basic knowledge of how to use brushes

p.s. I've already played with a lot of the stuff, and I came out with some pretty good image, one thing I did discover though, detach your textured circle area from the background, makes it easier to manipulate the color etc.

[RPMiller]

Nice stuff! Repped for the tutorial!

I moved the thread to mapping elements.

[RobA]

Repped for the term "tribal tattoo". Never heard of it before and throwing it into google had opened up a whole new source of iconography and symbols, Celtic knot-work, etc!

(After-all, its not what you know, its how well you can google for it!)

-Rob A>

[ravells]

Simply beautiful....and thanks for the tutorial! Repped!

[pyrandon]

That's awesome Yandor--very helpful! I can see this exact same technique for many mapping (& non-mapping) applications. Thank you so much!

[Yandor]

So I gave a shot at a more "shield" shape, pretty much a pain in the butt to get the same effect as I did the circle thing, but it worked out somewhat well... Well heres 2 ideas with it, tell me your opinions.

The first is an indent, the second is a pop out

[Midgardsormr]

I really like the one on the left--it looks like a lacquer inlay.