PDN Fanatics

Some good stuff there...I think I like lightning-in-a-bottle, and the 3-d puzzle best.

Hello there Lance. Good to have you on board. This forum is really starting to rock and roll now!

Great work there

Ditto, how'd you make the 'lightning in a bottle'? More specifically the lightning part?

Have a nice day,
~Sidneys1

@Drakkan- Thanks. The 3D puzzle was an adaption of a PS tutorial I did. I wanted to see if it was possible to do PS in PDN, and I was impressed it could be acheived. What PDN may lack in the power of PS' blending options, there's plently of workarounds to get by, and that is also Welshblue's favorite piece too.

@Goonfella- I'm glad to be here. It's nice to have a little laid-back forum and a handful of serious artists who concentrate more on constructive feedback than, "kewl."

@Sidney- The glass bottle was my first true attempt at glass. I got to admit if I had used alpha-masking, it would had made it a little easier, but I screwed up with it. The thing inside the bottle is a gaseous render from Chaoscope.

I did not realize that I could use alpha masking on the Chaoscope's render, but it works very effectively. Looking again at the bottle, I realized I should had separated the black background from the gas, and it would had made it more realistic.

Yep Lance' (that's going to take me ages to get used to) the Jigsaw piece is amongst my top faves of your works. Along with the castle and that misty forestry road you did. Along with your latest coat of arms. Those colours are beautiful. Great thinking too using the fractal like that

Thinking about that jigsaw piece ... a challenge ... give it a metal border on the outside and make the pieces look 3Dish glassy ?
I think that could look amazing in your gallery

That is just so weird. When I was flipping through Ash's gallery, and came across his glass piece he tried to help out at the official forum, I had a lightning bolt of an idea...to make a single piece of glassy jigsaw puzzle. That is just weird. I suppose even the great Oma would say that a lot of us are in tune with each other on the forum.

Freaky! But I am already thinking on how to make it... like Ben_R_R said, "Stay Tuned."

I like your fantasy castle and the bottle is amazing! For the latter I would recommend rotating some of the stars a bit, so they're not so uniform, maybe resize some of them also. Keep it up! I look forward to your next image!

Latest artwork, a response to Welshblue's challenge to make a glassy 3D puzzle...I think I failed somehow.

Image Removed.

C&C please.

BTW, Welsh..I used your Cog tut to help me with the 3Dish part of it. Cheers.

well, it *does* look glassy, but not transparent. Like a chunk of solid translucent glass.

Main things I can see are (in no particular order):

fixing the forward-facing edges in the vivd blue layer (feather or blur or something)

make the front face transparent

add something in the background that you can use to show refraction inside the glass

use regular reflection instead of wet floor...the reflection is the wrong shape.

This image reminds me of my puzzle pieces that I did. Like draakan said, you should make the puzzle piece transparent. Add something in the background so you could see through it. Aaaah...I'm remembering all those transparent images that I did.

Links?

You could still use wet floor to get the reflection - just use the rectangle select tool just below the jigsaw where the reflection would be. That should sort it out.

You didn't fail mate ... 'cos you took on the challenge

It's all a learning curve, and practice makes perfect. Maybe when you do the drop shadow part, use the transparency slider ?
Now I've got to try it

I still think my puzzle piece is a failure nonetheless. Not even using Ash's screenshot of his undo history helped.

Believe me, I was playing with the transparency slider and trying it on several different layers. Nothing, not even when I added a solid background color. The transparency was picking up the color from the solid background. Not good at all.