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Mystic female bowmen

Posted on May 13th, 2013. Written by JaspervD.

In this tutorial by MARKCAPE you will learn how to create the following signature:

This tutorial will teach you how great render and background selection together with some adjustment layers can create an amazing looking signature!

2. Adding the render and background

Create a new document (I used 500px x 280px) and add your render. Go to sharpen > smart sharpen and sharpen the render with 25%.

Now add your background on a layer behind your render.
Duplicate and rotate the background a couple of times and erase / move parts around to fill the entire background.
If the color in the background don’t match that of your render (my background was green while my render is blue), recolor the background. To do this first merge all your background layers into one big layer and edit the Hue/Saturation (CTRL+U) so it matches that of your render.

3. Adding color highlights to the background

Create a new layer between the background and your render. Using the bucket tool, fill it with black. After this take out your brush tool and select a soft round brush (size around 50px) and brush in certain area’s to create highlights. Set this layer on color dodge (you can also lower the opacity of this layer, I changed it to 75%)

Keep adding layers like this where you brush with color or black to highlight certain parts or make other parts darker. Try various brush sizes and layer blending modes and take your time! A good signature is never made with just a couple of layers, during the rest of the tutorial you will see that every now and than more and more color highlights where added to the sig.
My result after this step:

4. Blending the render with the background

The render still looks like it is on top of the background, and not part of it like it should be.
To blend in the render we are going to add parts of the background on top of the render.

As you can see I once again added more blue highlights on various parts of the background.

5. Adding text and C4D renders

Now we will add some text and C4D renders to the signature. While both of these can really improve your signature, they can also ruin your signature. It takes some practice to really get good at these!
For the text always try to keep it simple and never ever use outer glow or bevel and emboss! Go with easy to read fonts and perhaps a subtle gradient.
Don’t tuck away your text in a corner, place it around the main focal point. Our main focal point in the signature is the face, so place the render up/down and left/right of this render. Since there was some nice space left near the bottom right of the focal point, this is where I placed the text.

You can find some great C4D renders in our C4D render gallery. I picked an orange bubble C4D render and added it on top of all other layers, after this I removed parts of the C4D render which I didn’t like using the eraser tool.

6. Gradient Maps

Now I added some Gradient Maps using Layer > New adjustment layer > Gradient Map. You can create your own gradient maps, or pick some of the default maps. Pick gradient maps that match the colors in your sig and play around with the blending modes and opacity!
I used three gradient maps:

To get the following:

6. Final adjustments

I can’t really help you with this step, since it really depends on your signature what kind of final adjustments you need. Here are some things you could try:

• Various filters (I used the topaz filter, which you can download just google it)
• Sharpen / blur parts of the signature
• Color dodge to make parts of the signature lighter.
• Color burn to make parts of the signature darker.

This is what I did:

and here is the signature all finished (I also added a simple border)

Conclusion

In this tutorial I showed you how you can make a great looking signature with some basic technique’s. Don’t forget that the biggest part of your outcome is determined by the render and background you pick!