Bulletin Cover

I've decided to tilt the direction of this blog into a digital portfolio of my current and previous works as a designer.

For starters, I'm going to share a guide about how I made this bulletin cover for a Videogame community. I'm sorry because I will not be very thorough, and you'll need to have some basic photoshop knowledge to understand half of what I'm saying.

For this cover I used Photoshop CS5.
The dimensions for this were half a standard letter size (1275x1650)

I started with a black background and the map of Unova.
Rotated it a bit and set opacity on 55%.

At this point I was trying to figure what would be the most recurring theme in the Black & White ads, and decided to go with pattern of black and white rectangles. I looked for an image with these patterns, zoomed an area where I could get some clear squares and set the pattern. To do so, after you get a clear area, select four rectangles (more than that is not necessary) with the square marquee tool, go to Edit > Define Pattern, set the name and click ok.

Notice the 3200% zoom.

Then, to use your new pattern the way I did, you first select the area to fill with the marquee tool, select Edit > Fill (you can press shift + F5), use Patterns, on custom pattern, click on the arrow on the right and scroll down until you find the new pattern.

After I did this with black and white rectangles, each one in different layers, I did a diagonal selection in the middle, feathered to 100 pixels and erased the unnecessary parts.
Then I set the black rectangles mode in Overlay and the white ones in Linear light, so it had a little transparency and the Unova background was still visible. I know you're probably not following what I'm saying at this point, but bear with me.

At this point, it looked like this:

The next part was probably the most fun and defining.
As you know, I used Zekrom and Reshiram, which was the obvious choice. After I got my hands around some hi-res artwork, I resized them and positioned them. Since they´re supposed to be the main impact of the cover, I set a glow for each one. As for the colors, I used the eyedropper to get the blue of Zekrom´s reflection and the pink on Reshiram´s; then I used them to make an outer glow with these values:

The Linear Light mode gives a good glow-like vibe, but the opacity was lowered because I didn't want it to be so bright.

The next thing was to add a subtle but interesting "shadow" in the lower part. For this, I used both Zekrom´s and Rehiram´s silhouette, copied the layers, merged them, set the color overlay to black in the blending options, skewed it (Edit>Transform>Skew) so it would look like a shadow cast on the floor and added some Gaussian blur.

At this point, I was past the "hard" part and the rest consisted in adding the editorial stuff.
Added the Pokemon logo and Black & White logos, the banner in the left, which states publishing number and disclaimers, as well as the "Proyecto Reset" logo (that I also designed) with a little customization to fit with the whole theme.


In some other entries I will upload the full magazines (even though it´s in spanish) and some other quick guides explaining how I make them.

I´m also unemployed right now, so If you have something in mind, feel free to discuss.