"Flamesabers" by Joe

[Joe]

In a perfect world, every lightsaber would look like this...

I had to hand-paint both of these with my tablet, and boy, was it fun. The smoky stuff started as an accident, but I liked it and decided to run with the idea. I wanted to convey a slightly dry-ice-ish effect with the blue one, and a slightly firey effect with the red one.

[gabe565]

Cool!

[---Brad#2---]

Those are cool, I like the smoky effect.

[xz64]

Wow! thats cool
(the blue one reminds me of subzero )

[Joe]

Glad you like 'em.

[dandaman208]

lol, very nice i love it

and i agree it does look like sub zero

joe it looks very complex, did you just do your normal thing and then smudge it,
or is the whole thing hand painted?

I just cant seem to do it with just the smudge tool! there must be more more to it

By the way i like your new sig xz64

[Joe]

Yeah, that sig is pretty nice.

I did hand-paint all of it with my Wacom tablet. I used the same basic principles (base glow, edge glow, core), but I painted them rather than have the computer do all the blurring and everything. I didn't use the Smudge tool a single time. It was fairly complex, but I've been digitally painting a lot lately, and this was really just an extension of that. Glad you guys like it!

[ThirtyOne]

thats awesome!! have u got a tutorial for it??

[dandaman208]

yes, I agree you should write a tutorial for it

[Joe]

No tutorial yet, since I basically did it all manually. There were no filters or anything involved. But here was my basic process:

I started with the core layer, just like I normally do. Then I created a black Screen layer beneath that and began painting color onto it. I own a Wacom Intuos3 4x5 tablet, and that allows me to "paint" naturally--pressing harder on the tablet puts down more color, and pressing less allows me to apply very light layers of color. (Check out the Photoshop forum at conceptart.org for more info on digital painting. I'm Datameister there.) Then I just did the same thing with the edge glow layer. The smoky effects were mostly done on the edge glow layer (which I set to Linear Dodge, rather than the usual Color Dodge), using a small brush set to a low Flow value.

[ThirtyOne]

wow Joe, ur on 3 forums at a time...
tough mate...tough

[Joe]

I'm active on conceptart.org/forums, photoshopforums.com, PSFX, and micechat.com. I'm technically a member of rctpyro, the Animation Master forums, and a few others, but I don't visit those much anymore. I'm still the overall #5 top poster on rctpyro, thanks to my prolific posting there a little under a year ago.

[ThirtyOne]

hehe

[Joe]

This is now an entry in my deviantArt gallery.

[hellshenchman89]

This should be the lightsabers they use in movies!!!!!Nice Job......yep nice job