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Recently, Cuzzy from Cuzoogle.com contacted me about creating a new banner image for his blogroll post dubbed “Rolling a Blog Joint”. Since the overall premise is a play on the word joint, I thought something with a textured paper background and perhaps a pot leaf image would do the trick. Amazingly, enough there is a company named ‘Pot Leaf’ and their logo was available on BrandsoftheWorld.com, so that will save me a step of recreating the leaf in illustrator. The paper texture for the background will be a combination of a number of paper artwork that I found on Bittbox; which is a great resource for this type of stuff. So, that should be enough background on this project…let’s get ‘rolling‘.
STEP ONE: SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT
The finished size of this image will be 450p wide x 150p high, but I’m going to start with a bigger canvas size. The reason being is that I want to be able to adjust the textured background to fit, and later I will crop it out. So, let’s start out by creating a new document that’s 600×600. From there drag guides to the center at 300x and 300y and then recenter the rulers to make that point 0. After that drag out horizontal guides to +/- 75px and vertical guides to +/-225px. These outer guides will be our bounding box…all of the content will go inside this area. Anything outside the bounding box will be cutoff in the final step, so make double sure everything is inside that box.
STEP TWO: CREATING THE BACKGROUND
I want to make the background a different color from the text and leaf image, so I thought a light shade of brown would be a good contrast and it will make the paper more realistic. I’ll use a light shade (b79573) and a darker shade (7a5f43) and create a radial gradient; which will be the base of the background. Create a new layer and drag out a radial gradient starting a bit above the top guide and down towards the right corner (light to dark). We create a new layer, because I want to have a base layer that’s transparent…this layer will come into play later on in the tutorial. After you’ve made your gradient, rename the layer to ‘Base‘.
This is crazy…I can’t believe that July is almost over already. It seems like the Fourth of July was just yesterday and now we’re only 10 days away from August. Summer seems to be flying by and it’s almost over. Heck, my oldest son starts school next week…his summer is over. GrandmasterB took the family camping on the western slope of Colorado over the weekend. It was nice to unplug for a few days and get away from all of the hectic city life. I was shocked to see that gas prices are freakin’ insane on the other side of the Rocky Mountains. When we left we filled the Explorer up with E85 which was 2.89/gallon, but along the I-70 stretch there are no “corn stations” and gas was a whopping $4.42/gallon. I almost crapped myself when I only squeaked out a little over 10 gallons on $45…OUCH! I’ve got some pictures of the festivities during the camping excursion, but their being photoshopped to protect the identities of the innocent. I’ll write up something this week and share with everyone.
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