While I don’t claim to be a graphic designer, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, I’m not one to stray away from a challenge. Now I’ve mention my friend Richard King in a few posts before, but this time he had asked me to help him out with a watermark of sorts. Kinger has found a niche that suits him well and he does it as better than anyone else, he shoots guns. Yes we’re talking photography, but the man can shoot them at his targets as well as shoot them in the studio. So naturally when we talked about a watermark I was stuck on the idea of something firearms related. The most prominent idea was to make a custom shell casing to stamp on his images. Not only would it fit within his genre of photography, it married up to his persona quite nicely.
So here’s the plan. Find a generic image of a shell casing, preferably just the rear and primer. Then do my best in photoshop as my current skills will allow.
So we’ll start off with the generic Winchester 9mm casing.
Next order of business is to remove the labeling from the casing. I decided to use the Patch tool for this.
Now that we have a nice and clean workspace, its time to add in the text. Transforming using the arch transform and rotate transform options to place the text in just the right position. I sampled colors from the previous text in order to give the new wording the right feel. From there I used a hard chisel, inner bevel to simulate the same stamped look as you would normally find on the casing. Next I selected a similar color for the shadow mode just as before with the text color to give it the right blend. Finally, masking out the shell from the background and we have what I had envisioned from the start.
A quick adjustment to black and white gives us the oppurtunity to use the stamp as a new brush preset in Photoshop or in his choice of software, Aperture 3 as a watermark output preset.
While nothing spectacular from a Photoshop perspective, I’m very pleased with the final product. Kinger was more than satisfied as well. Keep an eye out for him, he’s showing up in gun publications across the US.
As always, be sure to visit my website Evan Tantum Photography for my latest work and Subscribe to my newsletter
