Seems a lot of you like my sigs, so I figure I'd make a separate thread than comment everyone's stuff individually.


I'm noticing a trend with a lot of stuff here. A lot of you tend to take some random picture that looks cool, or throw some random brushes around in different colors, then throw a border on it and call it a sig.

Now, this is art, so there are no defined "rules", but a sig tends to follow a certain scheme that makes things work. There's many different ways of doing achieving this ultimate goal, but all "good" sigs contain most, if not all of the following things.


The most important thing of all is that you need an overall "flow" within the sig. It's a bit hard to define what this is, exactly, but it's generally saying that everything works together. Everything should be going in a general direction. It doesn't simply have to be one direction, but just make sure it's not going all over the place.

Next is color. I see a lot of random colors and arrays of rainbows. It's nice and all for now, but you want to stick to colors that work well together. It depends what kind of feel you're going for, but this page can help you a lot. Decide if you want a warm or a cool feel, and work from there, using different shades of the same color, and analogous colors to build around the feel you want, then complimentary colors to build a contrast around it. tl;dr choose a color scheme and stick to it.

Choosing and building a focus is also incredibly important. You have an area to work with, but you only want to be focusing on one thing. Often the render you choose, or a certain part of the render. Everything else in that area is used to support and make the focus stand out. There's many different ways to create contrast to build up the focus. In general, three main things make up contrast. Sharpness vs blurriness, light vs dark, and vibrant vs dull. A contrast is created by abruptly bringing two opposites to each other. If you have something really light right next to something really dark, the light will contrast the dark. Seems like common sense, right? Use it to your advantage. When you want one thing to stand out, make it different than everything else that's going on.

There's a lot more to it, but these are the main things to go by for any type of art.


You can go deeper, and start dealing with things like size and placement, emotion and overall feel, lighting and depth, borders vs no borders, render choice, text choice, and so much more, but stick with these basics because they apply to everything.


Just, when dealing with text, the same rules apply. You want your text to be more of an effect than just having it there for the hell of it. I don't even include it on a lot of my sigs.

+1 rep.

Someone sticky this.

Wow, you definitely deserve to be a promoted to a GFXer.

Thanks, dude, I'ma start working on some art right now : D

Nice advice.

Stickied

Nice guide. Some pics would be nice though.

Would also take a lot of time that I'm limited on.


I'll see what I can do though.

Great, great guide.

You dont need a print screen button to take a screen shot on a mac dude.

I learned this by using my mac.

Press Command-Shift-4 on your keyboard, drag the arrow that comes up to the desired area that you want the pic of, and then click. The pic will show up on your desktop!

Love the guide +1