This has been the first Sunday in a while where I have had the time to sit down and just play in Photoshop. I always think it’s a good idea to test your skills, a little bit like going to the gym except instead of stretching muscles you are stretching pixels.
I was going through the tutorial blogs I follow for inspiration and at SpoonGraphics there was a cool post detailing a vintage engraved/etched illustration tutorial. I thought yep let’s give it ago.
The process is quite simple and I have to give a big well done to Chris, who I think spent a lot of time perfecting this look. You do need to use both illustrator and Photoshop, which I know would put a few people off but Chris does say you can create the illustrator part in Photoshop, although I kept with illustrator.
You create a 6 zig zag patterns in Illustrator or different thicknesses and copy them over to Photoshop, duplicate the image you want to be etched six times and use threshold to get varying depths that are then applied as layer masks to the patterns. It took about 30mins to complete and has opened the possibilities of being used again in future projects.
When choosing the image for this process I knew it had to be a portrait so grabbed a self-portrait composite I created earlier this year. The outcome looks like an old newspaper or printed image, possibly an old passport photo. It also has a halftone quality about it but I feel that there is more detail than if I had just used a halftone filter.
To read the full tutorial, click the link above.
What do you think of the image, is this something you want to try? Let me know in the comment section below as well as any other comments you may have.
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