This is a quick little Photoshop project I did to create a new twitter profile header image. I decided to remix an illustration from Jake Parker (http://mrjakeparker.com) and include a few personal elements. The majority of my new followers come from work-related activities, so I wanted an image that helped caputre some of the projects I'm known for, but not looks super corporate.

I don't know what it is about this illustration, but I love it. It just oozes "whimsy". I see it as a bit of a homage to Bill Waterson's classic Calivin and Hobbes sketch -- but I'm not sure if that was intentional or not.

THE REMIX

As far as remixes go, this one was pretty tame. I simply needed to erase the face of robots and slide in an illustration of the Creative Cloud logo we use on CreativeSDK.com. The Clone Stamp Tool was pretty helpful here in bringing in the right colors. With a pretty limited pace, I tend to blot with the tool rather than paint. If you paint too close to the original stamp area it will look fake. So mostly just a couple blots and then the Smuge Tool will a little noise applied ot the brush so that it maintained the texture of the illustration. 

The product icons were super simple. Just placed, positioned and made some minor adjustments to color / tone / opacity to help them blend a bit more into the illustration. Those icons are (from left to right) Creative Cloud Market, Brackets (http://brackets.io) and Creative Cloud mobile for iOS and Android.

 

The real challenge here was in expanding he canvas width. Twitter demands a pretty wide image for the header, so I had to find a way to increased the width without makin it look odd. I grabbed about 3 pixels from either edge and expanded to the final width. That gave me a seious of horizontal stripes as a color foundation. I then used the Underpainting artistic filter to add some texture.

I used a radial selection to capture the are of the illustration I wanted to maintain. Then I feathered the crap out of it and inverted it so that only the edges were selected. Then I used a radial blur to give it the distortion I was after. I think that gives it a fuzzy perephrial view look that makes it feel a bit more natural. I then grabbed a couple brushes and the smudge tool and blended it into the original illustration. It's not my best work, but at this point I was already on my 2nd glass of Macallan.

Last, but certainly not least, I wanted to get Jake's logo in there. I just screen-grabbed the logo from his site, did a quick mask to knock out the white background and replaced it with a color that was within the pallete he was using for the illustration.

 

The hardest part of this project was finding the right position in the image so that his logo would always be visible. Twitter does not make this easy. I probably nudge --> uploaded about 15 times until I go it just right. When you resize the browser twitter attempts to resize the image in a not so predictable way. PROTIP: If you want to test to see if your computer fan is working, just resize Chrome when looking at a twitter profile.

 

Oh yeah, I also added a triforce to the robot because I like to add triforces to everything.