The Crystal of Nysul

I guess The Taming was a valuable lesson for me in developing a story out of a photo series, a lesson that I took to heart when I started The Crystal of Nysul.

Tutorial: Comic Panels

Panel setup is a really difficult thing for us photo manipulators. As we don't draw our own material, we're slaves to how the photographer originally shoots the subject. With this lack of control we have more constrains in terms of setting up the panels. We need to setup our panels based on the source material, rather than setting up the panels and then drawing the material on top.

With that in mind, I'll take a fairly different approach to panel setups. Here's what I learn from working on The Taming.

Tutorial: Speech Bubbles

Sometimes in MC photomanip, we come across a set of pictures that demands a more structured narrative, thus picture series are born. Every one has their preference in the style of picture series, mine is in comic styles as the dialogues are much easier to follow and more complex exchanges can happen.

I started my picture series The Taming last week, and learnt a few tricks that I'd like to share with you! Starting with Speech Bubbles!

Plastic Mask Tutorial

Couple weeks ago I came across this fantastic tutorial of applying a plastic mask effect to a portrait. Couldn't really believe my luck to find it on a mainstream website. Anyhoo I started experimenting with the effect with mixed results.

The downside of the tutorial is that it uses Cinema 4D to render the mask, which may not be super accessible by everyone. Luckily I remembered a piece of software I played with years ago called DAZ Studio (a free alternative to Poser). I recall it be faster than poser, less resource hungry, and came with a £0 price tag. So let's see if we can achieve the effect!

Advanced Tentacle Tutorial

So yesterday I showed you how to use the Shear filter to create some basic tentacles. Today, let's explore another method to give us more flexibility in creating tentacles.

Veins and Tentacles tutorial

A couple of fellow collective members had asked for tutorials on the veins and tentacles effects from my last manip, so here it is!