Practicing Your Knowledge: PS Tutorial

Tutorial Poster

I took this blog's assignment as an opportunity to learn something new about design.  I've done a few photoshop tutorials in the past, but I haven't devoted time to learning anything new recently in Photoshop.  I found a tutorial on DesignInstruct.com titled How to Make a Funky Retro Music Poster in Photoshop.  I've always liked this warm, nostalgic look to posters and handbills like these, so I figured I could sit down and try it out for myself.  I wanted to stick with the same color scheme, so I tried to find a modern event that uses these colors.  Wakarusa Music Festival uses them, so I figured I could make a poster involving their 2013 festival.

     The tutorial walked you through how to drop opaque patterns into the background, how to create a vinyl record from scratch, and then superimpose the record onto a record player.  I took some creative liberties throughout the tutorial and used my own drawings for the background pattern, and used a photo from a previous Wakarusa for the label on the record.  

      There were a lot of things that I couldn't do according to the tutorial because I don't have the same version of Photoshop, I only have Elements.  There are ways to recreate the same effects, so it just took more time to get what I wanted.  There are a few things I learned from this tutorial.  I learned how to create a vinyl record from scratch through radial blur, noise and messing around with opacity and layers to create a glossy surface.   I also realized that I need to sit down and do a lot more design tutorials because they're actually really entertaining and very helpful because you can pick and choose what effects you want to use on future projects.  

       The act of actually recreating an image I see is what I love about design.  This can either be recreating something that has already been made, with my own little twist/remix on it, or taking a pen to paper and drawing what I see in my head. They walk you through step by steps, but they expect you have some prior experience with photoshop upon beginning the tutorial.Doing this tutorial instead of just reading about how to create something was a lot more effective.  I was able to have help (to an extent, since there wasn't actually a person showing me how to do it) yet still create the original vision I had in my head, which was pretty close to what showed up below:

My Poster