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.

[ravells]

I loved the work in your gallery, thanks again for pointers! Ambigrams are truly a beautiful artform.

[WidowMakers]

Here is my rough .psd file that shows my steps to get closer to teh final set. Then I dumped it into illustrator (also attached)

[icosahedron]

Following this thread with interest (I've almost got an 'Icosahedron' ambigram figured out ) I looked around the web for examples and I found one that neatly solves a perennial problem with maps of buildings.

Whenever you have a stairway, unless you are a master with shadows (I'm not), there is a difficulty deciding which way the stair goes. Even if you put an arrow on it, you still don't know whether the arrow is supposed to point up or down.

But I found a simple ambigram I can use:

dn

'DN' for down, but looked at the other way up, it says 'UP'.

It won't help the Shadowmasters, of course, (and those guys are as ubiquitous as the River Police) but it may be useful for my fellow novices to add this simple text icon to their shadowless stairways.

[Steel General]

That's a neat find...