Hello everyone! Today we’re going to be learning how to make our favorite athlete’s wallpaper. In this case, we’ll be making a Marty Turco wallpaper, but feel free to use any professional athlete (or yourself).
The first step of making our Marty Turco wallpaper/poster is getting a picture of Marty himself. An action shot is preferred, but use whatever you can find. I’ll be using this picture:
Once you have your picture of your athlete, you (obviously) need to create a new document in Photoshop. The size of your document is really up to you, but I’ll be using 1280x1024 since it’s the size of my screen resolution.
When you have your size figured out, we’re going to but a black background on the first layer, then put the render on top of it.
After you’ve placed your render, we’re going to lay down some simple brush work. Basically just take a large, soft, round brush and make a rough sketch where you think light would look good in your wallpaper. Make sure to do this on a new layer.
Once you have your basic brushing down, we’re going to make our first big change to our wallpaper. Grab a C4D render, it doesn’t matter how it looks, but make sure that it’s one of the team’s major colors.
Don’t worry about making your C4D render placement perfect. We’re going to duplicate the C4D render two times and randomly place them in the document. Be sure the rotate them (ctrl+t) to give them a different look then the original.
When you’re happy with your placement/rotation, you’ll need to merge the three C4D layers together. To do this, just go to layer – Merge Down. Repeat as necessary. Once you’ve combined them all into one layer, we’re going to apply a radial blur to them. With your merged C4D layer highlighted, go to Filter – Blur – Radial Blur. Changer the blur type to ‘zoom’ and the amount to ‘100’. Additionally, set the blur center in the direction of your render. Your settings should look something like this:
Hit OK. You should get something like I have below:
As of right now, the C4D makes the whole thing look too dark. To fix this, we’re going to change the blending of the layer to “Color Dodge”. This will give our C4D a much lighter and energetic color.
As you can easily see now, the C4D looks much better.
Our next step to our wallpaper is making is making some thick lines that come out from our render. This step requires knowledge of the pen tool, so if you don’t know how to use it, now’s a great opportunity to learn. These lines are similar to what we did on the Template Tutorial’s header. Here’s what our final result will be like:
Once you’ve made your lines, duplicate your render layer (your athlete). We’re going to smudge the render some. Take your favorite smudge brush (I’m using LPF_Smudge) and smudge your render some. (Remember if your smudge brush doesn’t come preset with scatter and shape dynamics, you’ll need to set them in the brush options.) Don’t worry about smudging a ton, less is more since we’ll be smudging the render a few more times. Once your happy with your result, set the blending options to “Overlay” and put the smudged layer behind the original layer. Here’s my result:
Duplicate your render layer again and smudge it again. This time though, smudge it with a bigger brush (I used a star brush). Again, set the blend mode to “Overlay”. Here’s my result:
Duplicate your render layer again and smudge it with a small to medium sized brush.
We’re now going to duplicate our render layer one more time, and smudge it one more time. But this won’t be our typical smudge like our last few. Turn your shape-dynamics and scattering off. Simply click on your render and drag outwards. You’ll understand completely when you see what I did:
The next step is simple, basically get another C4D render of the same color and “flow” or “direction” and place it in your document. We’re not going to be doing any fancy blurs or anything to this layer, so leave it as it is. However, you can erase some of the render if you do not like all of it.
We’re going to start by making our top “layer” first. Make this pen tool path go in the some-what same direction and flow of our previous lines. This is going to look pretty random at first, but that’s because we haven’t made our sides to this 3D-design.
Now that we have our top finished, we’re going to make the side. We only have to make one side because the abstract design starts behind our render. Making the side is easy, just follow the direction and flow of the top. Remember that the top half of the side doesn’t have to be perfectly aligned with the top because the side layer will sit behind the top layer.
Now we have both the top and side of our abstract design. Just to clearly separate the top from the side, on a new layer, we’re going to stroke a 1 px black brush along the edge.
We’re going to do one more of these abstract-designs. Placement is up to you, I did mine in the lower right corner. Just make sure it flows well with the rest of the design.
Now all we need to do is add the players name and number. This is completely optional – I think it looks just as good with the name as it does without, so it’s really up to you and your design. Here’s the finished product (click for full size):
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