Sig Creation by a n00b...

I have been asked how I make my sigs so I thought I would make a blog post to try to explain it. I am no graphics designer nor do I have expensive programs to work with so I improvise. I use Paint Shop Pro 6 for editing photos and PhotoImpact 10 for the lettering. I sometimes also pull out Microsoft Photo Editor 2000 (Office 2000 Suite) for cropping since it is the easiest for me to use.

Remember this might be the difficult way of doing it since I don’t know anything about graphics design or the programs I use.

I’m going to use a recent sig I made for JD Sour Mash as an example. The first thing was to get an idea of what he wanted. Basically he wanted a Spartan with a Jack Daniel’s bottle in one hand and his guitar in the other with the neck of the guitar morphing into the barrel of a Halo 2 battle rifle. So I had him send me a picture of the guitar and he also included a render of a JD bottle:



So first I had to find a suitable Spartan pic which I was able to find at a site called Render-world.com:



Thanks to the cut outs at this website it requires a lot less erasing to make the picture fit into whatever background you want to use (thanks for showing me this site Puzzled). So to begin I cut the bottle from the white background and positioned it in the Spartan’s hand. Due to the position of the hand I had to do a little modification to make it look as if the Spartan has his hand wrapped around the bottle. I use a clone brush tool to accomplish this which should be included in almost any graphics program you could use aside from something like MS Paint.



As you can see it looks rather crude but when you shrink the picture down many of the details that look rough or out of place are too insignificant to show up. So then I had to locate a background. I was able to do this using yahoo image search. I found a nice ocean scene from Bungie.net to use (go figure). I just cropped it resized it and then added the Spartan.



In order to smooth out the edges I use an eraser tool with a low hardness and opacity setting to make it look as if the pictures were created together instead of the cut out it really is. It took quite a bit of practice to get it right and I’m sure it varies from program to program so I can’t really tell you exact settings for this.

On any Halo sig I do I like to add the person’s Halo Emblem to the picture. In this case JD’s Halo Icon was this:



Since the Spartan wasn’t the color his Emblem shows I had to do a little editing. I cut out the main emblem from the background picture and resized it to fit into the sig:




Once again the edges are rough but that will make little difference after the resize. I then use a perspective and cylindrical deformation to make the emblem fit onto the Spartan’s chest plate. Once I have the correct perspective, curve and size, I use the erasing tool to lighten the color in the shaded part of the chest plate.



Now came the hard part, the guitar. First I had to find a picture of a battle rifle that wasn’t a computer generated photo since the guitar itself was an actual picture so the match would look a little more believable (although I can’t say I really succeeded).




I used the mirror function to flip it in the right direction and then cut the picture out. Once I had that done I had to use the erasing tool to remove most of the gun leaving the barrel. Then the guitar’s head was erased and I again used the erasing tool with low opacity to fade them together.



Once that was done I had to figure out how to fit it into the picture. After a lot of trial and error I decided to put the guitar behind the Spartan’s hip and in this case the guitar’s lower cut had to be removed. Now the problem with the hand. I used the clone tool to effectively erase most of the hand by cloning the ripples from the ocean. Then with the same tool I copied the color of the Spartan’s glove and added the fingers and knuckles through (once again) trial and error.




Finally the text; I wanted to do something interesting. After staring at a Jack Daniel’s label I decided to use it to create the screen name, Halo 2 logo, clan and a little something I’ve added to my last few clan sigs. It is the person’s forum name, WG for the clan and the date they joined in a MMDDYY format. I used a text filter to get the right bend for JD using a standard True Times Roman font. I then used the Halo font for the Halo logo. Basically, it’s just an O flipped with the dot in the middle erased and a 2 added in. The Sour Mash was a simple cursive font (can’t remember the font name). I like to add 2old2play.com to all of my sigs if I can even though we are all obviously on the site and the sig most likely won’t be seen by anyone outside of it. On this one there really wasn’t anywhere to put the site name so I made it extremely transparent and put it behind the halo using the Danube font from the 2old2play logo.

It may be a little crude but I think it came out pretty good, I’m just glad JD liked it. The main thing you need for this is patience. There is always a lot of trial and error in all of the sigs I do. These things probably take me a hell of a lot longer than someone who knows what they’re doing but I do enjoy it. It can take me anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days.