Need ideas for forum avatar

[ravells]

Excellent tutorial, thanks! You really do need an artistic eye for this and I'm keen to give it a go. Would you recommend starting with pencil and paper and then moving onto a vector program to make the letter forms?

[WidowMakers]

Excellent tutorial, thanks! You really do need an artistic eye for this and I'm keen to give it a go. Would you recommend starting with pencil and paper and then moving onto a vector program to make the letter forms?

Paper and pencil is good to get an idea about if a word can work. But...I like to quickly move to Photoshop (or another raster program). That way you can quickly copy and rotate the letters.

I start on the left side of the word, get a 15 pixel brush (don't worry, the clean look comes later) and draw. Once I think my left side looks good, I copy the layer and rotate it 180 degrees. Then I see how these letters need tweaked to look better. Then I rotate that layer back and repeat (I save layers that I think are ok and do not want to mess up if I decide to go back).

After I have my word done, it is really rough. Then I saved the image and imported it into illustrator to really clean it up. I did Widow (by tracing the imported image) and then just copied and rotated it.

DONE! It took me about 3 hours of solid work (but much more rework and initial doodling to figure out what I was doing) to make it. I made the Diego names (in my albums) in about 45 minutes. And Darken here was about that as well.