Well, I'm going to be posting the progression of my atrocious signatures.

First signature ever made (Also first time using Photoshop for something other than cropping pictures. )










Obviously feel free to CnC as much as you care to.

I'm no expert in tag making, but the ones you posted have some flaws
some cnc from me
- a lot of dead space (the white background concept is cool, but only works if you know what you're doing)
- purple needs to go home
- the render is very choppy/lq (use pen tool to render your stocks, magic wand tool makes them terribad)
- make sure to blend in your render with the background, in the signatures you posted above it looks slapped on there
- look around the graphic inspiration thread for ideas on colors and so on, monotone sigs aren't bad, but they are frowned upon most of the time

and most importantly: read tuts if you want to see some real progress and the advice you're gonna get from here, might be a little harsh, but you will improve if you listen to these guys

This post was edited by Awer on Apr 9 2013 02:20pm

first and foremost, you cannot produce a high quality tag without high quality resources.

your render looks like it was magic wand tool'd out.

DO TONS OF TUTORIALS

DO TUTORIALS UNTIL YOUR EYES BLEED

THEN DO MORE TUTORIALS

Forgot to mention.. I rendered it myself (Though I didn't use the magic wand tool), which was my first time rendering an image, or erasing anything in photoshop for that matter.

And yes, I plan on doing tutorials, lots of them. The main thing I gathered from stalking the Graphic Design section for so long is to forever do tutorials.




Yeah, I'm aware that it's horrible.

And as said above, I plan on doing the tutorials. And the harsher the CnC, the more I'll strive to get better.





And thanks for posting.

Just following tutorials to the best of my ability at the moment.

If your sig is the result of a tutorial, then link the tut as well please, so we can see if its bad because of the tut or because of you (or good...but it'll probably be bad)

Oh, it's me devastating the tutorials with my apalling.. skills?

First one -
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs18/f/2007/130/7/7/Full_Signature_Tutorial_by_Senthrax.jpg

Second one -
http://sanderrednas.deviantart.com/art/signature-tutorial-70881138

This post was edited by illyria on Apr 9 2013 05:10pm

1. Looks like you did all the smudging at once, rather than at multiple points throughout the tutorial.

2. The Orange -> Purple gradient map is way too strong.

3. Light source is completely different than the tutorials, way too strong.
You want your main light source to have a natural flow to it.


It's decent for a 2nd tag though.

1. It was when the tutorial said to -
"Filter>brush strokes>spatter
Filter>brush strokes>angled strokes
Filter>brush strokes>sprayed strokes"
all at once that did the majority of the smudging and it got away from me.

2. Yeah, I definitely need to practice with keeping the colours in check.

3. The tutorial just said to "add a blue lightsource" without explaining how, so I tried to use the lightsource technique from this tutorial - http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs27/f/2008/170/6/b/Lighting_Tutorial_by_Xpnze.jpg
Though I completely agree. Are there any other tutorials on light sources or should I just practice more with that one?

Also, thank you for putting together the list of tutorials, as well as the CnC.

Edit - Another question, should I repeat tutorials and get better at the techniques explained or keep switching to different ones?

This post was edited by illyria on Apr 9 2013 07:00pm

Never leave the tutorial until you know the techniques by heart. Only way to get better is to fully know what you are doing. That is just my opinion though. I am no not as good as the previous posters, so they may have a better suggestion.