Poster (Vintage?) in progress

[sweetbeat]

Can't wait to see the endresult. nice explosion. or these serveral layers with a gradient color? or is it a secret?

[Lyrics]

Hey sweetbeat, the explosion is accomplished through many many steps. One of the most significant techniques however is layer masking, which i use to light different parts of the beams - however the lighting and coloring ALSO comes from layer styles - where i apply color gradients. Another feature i use heavily is layer blending to get deep shadows and bright highlights. Other layer styles i use are inner and outter glows. I use Gaussian blur a little bit, here and there, and some motion blur.

I use various custom brushes to hide in the layer masking. The smoke for instance. The speckles are mostly achieved through using dissolve blend mode on semi-transparent "blobs", flattening, then layer masking.

The last two major things I can think of are: I repeatedly flatten/apply layer style/flatten/apply layer style over and over and over. Second, i duplicate the layers over and over and over, getting rid of some, keeping others, testing stuff out, blending, wrecking, restarting, etc. Taken together, that explosion had around 70-100 layers (but at one time no more than 30ish)

It's an organic process. I'm sure there are wizards out there that can do this by formula - but I'm not there yet unfortunately =(

[Lyrics]

I've simplified the image. I felt it was becoming too complex.

[prewe]

i kinda liked it more when it was a little busy, don't really know why though. but it's still lovely!

[Lyrics]

If i have the time i will go back and another version of some sort - i certainly didn't dislike the "busyness". To be honest, I partly want to see what kind of s.Hansen style i can bring to the table. With the fireworks i moved far away from a vector-styled foundation. The detail was way-realistic to it's surroundings giving me a really odd feeling. I'll keep chipping away though!

Thanks for letting my know your feedback, it's helpful!

[Lyrics]

jaggies need to be dealt with. ugh

[ianm]

nice touches :) i like that but love the "before" version

[prewe]

i must say this is really inspirational. i wanna do something like this as well now! getting really neat

[cj2a]

I'm digging version one...very graphic and simple...I'd even like to see it without the two vertical fireworks trails. Nice job so far.