Wide's World
By Widearea
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right! Here I am...
Finding the forest through the Trees
My favorite comic book character of all time is the Swamp Thing. Sure, there are your basic super heroes, like Superman or Spiderman, the Hulk, Wonder Woman, even the Flash (let's face it, he was kind of a pussy), and all your basic fast as lightning, bullet-proof, gold breast plate toting, able-to-fly muther fuckers. But when we mature as people, it becomes evident that true super powers are really just the stuff of legends, and the real wonder is in our ability to express our myth as humans, through the poetry and artistry of the comic's frames itself. Well, for me, the Swamp Thing embodies all that is meaningful and relevant to the human struggle.
In a nutshell, there's this scientist on a bayou that gets blown to oblivion in a strange laboratory accident involving his biochemical research project, and instead of dying he becomes this eternal being of the Swamp. He is symbiotically in tune with it and all its mystery. As the seasons change so does his green, odiferous vegetative body. And not only that, but there's the Parliament of Trees to rule over the land, governing with its arbory wisdom and ancient bark. If that isn't enough he falls in love with a human woman - a platinum blonde busty beauty who is his only true passion beyond the bog. And oh my friends, the comic book artists leave no crevaceous detail unsketched!
Ah, but I digress.
Oh yes, which brings me to our topic this week. Our journey through the swamp will take us to a lesson in using some basic text effects for title graphics to use in our adult web sites, the comic books of our livelihood, if you will.
Hopefully you have found yourself a good image editing program and you are comfortable with it to get started. In this example we will use Photoshop and some of its basic features to create a few different title graphics. Our goal is to enhance our site without spending too much time creating art, or blowing precious bandwidth with elaborate designs that really only satisfy our own egos. Remember, nobody really cares too much about how good your graphics are in the long run. It's sales that count.
