The other cover





When it rains, it pours and we will all need something to shield us from getting wet; an umbrella, for example. That's why we initially thought an umbrella would best represent our theme of rain, water and storm for July 2010.

And then came a better option: wonderful photos from Rey Ramos which depict water and beaches (see a separate article in this issue featuring his theme-related photographs).

In keeping of our three previous covers which featured excellent photographs depicting the current month's themes, we decided to shelve our being too artsy in this issue.

This is our 'other cover', or that which almost made it to being our issue cover for July 2010.

And because the work we put into doing the artwork is not a joke, I thought it would be nice to make a column out of it.

For this simple work, we used more than five different sources.

We started with Smashing Magazine's tutorials on rain showers and water drops.

The bluish background originally came from a tutorial of a deep sea setting like so.



But after some time, we get rid of the deep sea look and instead opted for the bluish background.

The rain effect was taken from a tutorial on designing a war movie poster and from this excellent day rain tutorial.

For a neophyte read-copy-and-guess-if-you-can't-follow-it like us, it was a feat to be able to get a rain effect like that. (We're sure there's an easier way to do a rain effect but we have the penchance of complicating things).

The umbrella is a hard part, too. (Yes. Even if it's amateur-ishly done, it was a laborious effort. We could have just copied an umbrella graphics and pencil-color it in Photoshop, but no. We decided to create it in Adobe Illustrator using a pen tool).

The heart-shaped handle was an accident using a warp tool in AI and we stick with it because we thought it animates the graphics a bit. (We used the same heart-shape handled umbrella for a poem in this issue).

The droplets (if you happen to notice them!) as well as the water drops were taken from brusheezy.com.

Whew!

So here's a call to our graphic artist readers out there: please, please! Share us your talent and be featured in our monthly issue. We don't pay cash, but we will assure you of our utmost gratitude (and a number of visits, too, to your site from our regular readers).



► Read Nebz's previous articles here.

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