The sepia toned warmth of an old photo is easy to accomplish. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to antique a contemporary photograph in just a few easy steps. The photo I’ve started with is an image towards the bay from downtown San Francisco, but you can of course, start with any image.

We’re going to first give the photo a little bit of a professional presentation by giving it a fake mat, or border. Select the entire image by using Ctrl+A on Windows, or Command+A on the Mac. Select a dark foreground color, and then click Edit > Stroke. Set the stroke width to 1 pixel, and the location to center. This will give an outline to the image.

Next, to create the effect of a mat, make sure your background color is set to white. Select Image > Canvas Size, and add 10 pixels to the width and height of your image. This will give a 5 pixel border to your image. For a more dramatic mat, increase the size.

The next part is the easiest. Transform your color photo into a sepia image by selecting Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. You can also use the keyboard shortcuts of Ctrl+U on Windows, or Command+U on the Mac. Click the colorize checkbox, and adjust the Hue slider until you find the effect you’re looking for.

As a last touch, add some noise using the grunge brush from a previous tutorial to give an aged look to your image.

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This quick and easy tutorial will walk you through how to create a grunge brush for aging and antiquing your artwork. The end result will be a brush that you can use again and again.

Start with a new file, 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. You can make it smaller, but this should give you a good size brush.

Select Filter > Render > Clouds. This will add cotton candy fluffiness to your image, which may seem like it’s a long way from gritty grunge, but it’s really only a few steps. The Clouds filter is one of the Photoshop filters that uses foreground and background colors to create the effect. If you get nothing, it’s probably because your foreground and background colors are set to the same color. The colors I’ve used in the example are a dark red brown and white.

Next, select Filter > Noise > Add Noise. I set the amount to 10%, and selected Gaussian as the type and selected the Monochromatic checkbox as well. This step adds the grit and grime to the equation.

Next, we’ll adjust the levels to give us just a little bit of grunge and texture. Select Image > Adjust > Levels, or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+L on Windows, or Command+L on the Mac. The Levels adjustment window allows you to set the overall lightness and darkness of an image. In this example, I’ve lightened up the entire image by sliding the white Input Level triangle to the left to 114. I’ve also adjusted the black Output Level, which is located below the input level graph. I  moved the black triangle to the right to 194. You can see that this has lightened the overall effect a great deal.

 Manipulating the black output level is a quick way to lighten any image, and it’s a great way to make a background lighter, so that text on top of the background is more legible.

Experiment on your own image by dragging the various black and white input and output sliders to see how they effect your image. When you find the result you’re looking for, click OK.

The last step is to select Edit > Define Brush Preset. This will give you the opportunity to name the brush. The brush will appear in your brush list as the last brush on the list.

I have to admit that I’m a lot more likely to get things done if they’re written on a beautiful list, rather than a scrap of tattered napkin. This set of Photoshop brushes offers a variety of styles, from royally elegant to urbanely grungey. Create a batch of 3 by 5 cards and keep them with you so that no brilliant idea and no urgent task goes unrecorded.

You can download these nifty brushes here as a zip file. Please don’t redistribute these brushes, but point people back to my web site for download. They take some time and effort to create. I hope that you find them useful.

Find out how to create and print out batches of 3by5 inch cards in a tutorial.

Donna Reed, June Cleaver, Gidget, and all the other good girls of the 1940s and 1950s assured us that if you did the right things, you could end up in a spotless rancher with shiny faced kids and a husband who came home from the office each night.

To many folks, that sounded safe, clean, all American, and wholesome.

To some of us, especially regarded in retrospect, it looks like the ingredients for squashed expression, thankless boredom, creativity expressed only in radish roses or rickracked curtains, and a smothering set of rules for behavior to be that good girl.

Bad girls blatantly refused to bend to the confines of the good girl role. They stayed out late, wore their tops too low and too tight, wore their eyeliner dark and their thoughts darker. They made their own rules and often suffered the social consequences. They were bad, and infinitely more intriguing.

Here to celebrate those bad girls is a set of Photoshop brushes pulled from the my collection of magazines of the period, cleaned up and ready to roll. These bad girls come with their own racy tabloid headlines. Download this brush set, which comes with a text file and brushes in .abr format.

Don’t redistribute these girls, or I’ll send their sisters (more bad girl brushes coming soon!) after you. Seriously, a lot of time and clean up went into these tabloid sisters. Please point people to my web site so I can justify the time and hosting expenses. A link back would be very much appreciated, too.

A little while back, I showed you how to create a simple gridded background. That’s nice, but let’s get a little bohemian, and make that gridded background more interesting.

We’ll throw a couple of standard Photoshop filters on, add a little brushwork, and you’ll end up with an interesting, textured background for your 3 by 5 cards or web page or any project.

If you’ll be creating this for a 3by5 card, select File > New, and enter a Width of 5 inches a Height of 3 inches, and set the Resolution to 200 pixels/inch.

Fill the background with your grid, as shown here.

Add a new layer. Select Filter > Render > Clouds. This is one of the built in Photoshop filters that uses the foreground and background colors to create the effect. In the example shown here, the foreground is hexcode #592001, and the background is white. (Click the preview to enlarge.)

After adding the clouds, we’ll add a little noise to create more texture. Select Filter > Noise > Add Noise. I set the amount to 12%, the Distribution to Gaussian, and clicked the Monochromatic checkbox.

The effect is overpowering and has hidden the gridded background. Set the cloud layer’s blending mode to Multiply, and change the opacity slider to something around 35%.

You now have a pretty cool effect, of slightly rumpled paper. We’ll take the aging process one step further with the Burn tool.

Toggle the cloud layer off and select the burn tool. You’ll find the tool by clicking on the dodge tool and holding down the mouse button until the burn tool appears. You’ll want to select the settings shown above: a soft brush, the Range set to Highlights, and an exposure under 30%. Now you can loosely scribble on the edges to darken them and create the effect of old, worn paper. Experiment by changing the exposure amount and the brush size.When you’re done scribbling, you should have something like the example shown here.

Toggle the cloud layer back on by clicking the eye icon next to the layer label. Add a text layer using a handwritten or antique looking font to complete your artwork. The font I’ve used in the example is called Blackadder and is available from ITC. You may want to snag a freebie font from the collection of handcrafted fonts featured a while back.
Experiment and enjoy your new antiquing abilities.

This may not be exactly how grandma got things done, but she didn’t have Photoshop to play around with, did she?

I’ve just finished watching a BBC production called, “Frank Lloyd Wright - Murder, Myth, and Modernism”. This film gives an overview of FLW’s personal and professional lives. The things that are staying with me how he centered his life, both personal and professional, around the home he built named Taliesin, even though it was the site of a shocking mass murder that took the life of the woman he loved.

The other point that’s resonating with me is that FLW reinvented himself at 59, when he was dead broke, and that the years that followed were some of his most prolific and innovative. As part of his reinvention of himself, he recruited backers, who would receive a percentage of his earnings. He wrote a book that began his self-mythology, and also started an apprenticeship program where young men and women stayed and worked at Taleisin.

The program included a look at many of the public and private buildings he designed, some of which I hadn’t seen before. Below is a snippet of this program:

If that snippet isn’t working, you can go to WowTV.

For fellow font collectors, P22 offers some wonderful FLW fonts, including the Exhibition and Eaglefeather sets.

This is a simple way to create your own graph paper, in any size or color that you want it. I’ve found, that for a background, it’s generally good to use pale colors so that they don’t obscure the type, printing, or doodles on top of them of them.

If you’ll be creating this for a 3by5 card, select File > New, and enter a Width of 5 inches a Height of 3 inches, and set the Resolution to 200 pixels/inch. (You can, of course, use this method for anything from a web page to a full sheet of paper to a billboard).

Next, create another new file, by selecting File > New, and enter a Width of .3 inches, a Height of .3 inches, and the Resolution to 200 pixels/inch. This is the file that will contain the grid pattern you will create.

Next, click the foreground color in the Toolbox, and select a pale color for your gridlines. I’ve selected a pale blue gray, hexcode #C5D1eA. Select the Pencil tool, and set the brush size to 1 pixel.

Draw a straight horizontal line by shift+clicking the pencil in the grid file. Draw a vertical line by shift+clicking with the pencil tool again. It doesn’t matter where the lines intersect, just make sure that the lines go completely from side to side and top to bottom.

You’ve just created the grid background! To apply this as a repeating background, select Edit > Define Pattern, and enter a name for the pattern.

To fill the image with this background, select the 3 by 5 image you created in the first step. Next, select Edit > Fill > Pattern, then browse to the grid background you’ve just added. Click OK and the background pattern will fill the 3by5 card.

The background of your index card will fill with the pattern you’ve selected.

This gridded background can be used in a number of ways, such as filling the background for writing paper, or creating a guideline in a piece of artwork. If you’re using the background as part of a collage, or as guidelines in your art, you would want to put the background on it’s own layer.

Altering the colors and size of the background can give a wonderful variety of effects.

You can also alter the size and colors of the background in many ways to achieve different effects. You can add the grid to a gradient or textured background, or place it over a photo.

Happy 2008!

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to get more organized for this year? If so, you can start off by creating some nifty calendars from templates. I’ve rounded up links to some helpful free, downloadable templates to get you started.

How much you customize the calendar templates here is completely up to you.

Do calendar weeks start with Sunday or Monday? Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I always thought they started with Sunday. However, many of the calendar templates shown here give you a choice of starting with Sunday or Monday. I like the idea of a nice soft weekend gently padding each end of a hard five day work week.

Templates for Photoshop

I’ve posted a collection of individual Photoshop brushes for each month of 2008, and the set includes a single brush with all the months. These are perfect for printing out on 3 by 5 cards to carry with you in your hipster PDA.

Over at Trimoon’s blog, you can download a Photoshop template that includes editable text layers, so that you can use whatever fonts and colors you’d like, as well as space for your own photos. There are three styles of calendar templates available. One style is in the traditional one-page-per-month, and there are two templates for all-the-months-on-a-single-page format as well.

At Jeffrey Friedl’s blog, you can download a custom Photoshop script that Jeffrey has created, and manipulate it to create just about any format of calendar that you’d like. If running scripts sounds a little too tech, scroll down to the section that says “Pre-built sample PSD files for 2008″ to download Photoshop files that you can use sans script. It’s ok to admit that tinkering with Javascript in Photoshop might be a bit too scary. Admitting it is the first step to overcoming your fear.

Templates in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) Format

I won’t tell. The rest of the world sees you as a sophisticated, urbane and witty person. The only humor that tickles your funny bone are the cryptic cartoons in the New Yorker. They’d never guess that you secretly cackle over Lolcats or giggle at CuteOverload. Just between you and I, you can download a free LOLcats 2008 calendar to decorate your secret underground lair.

Templates in PDF format only require the free Adobe Acrobat reader to print. You can also customize PDF templates in Photoshop by opening the PDF file in Photoshop a page at a time, then working whatever color or design magic you’d like.

Canon’s web site offers some really unusual and interesting templates in PDF format. One of my favorites is a calendar with black and white photos that sits in a CD case for display. You can recycle a CD case, and if you’re feeling especially green, print the template on the back of paper to recycle the paper as well.

As you can see from the image above, Canon offers an imaginative variety of templates for download. These are all in PDF format.

Click here to read the rest of this exciting entry

Well, 2007 just zipped right past us, didn’t it? In the spirit of managing my time, and remembering to:

• pay the rent on time
• plan for vacation (hooray!) and time off
• keep on top of my blog postings

I’ve created a brush for each month of 2008, and a single Photoshop brush that contains all the months in one. You can use these wherever you need a timely reminder.

These brushes are in a zipped format. You can download the Zipped archive of 2008 calendar free Photoshop brushes. You can use these brushes in any program that supports the Photoshop .abr file format. Instructions for loading the brushes are included in a text file along with the brushes.

Please don’t repost these anywhere else, but point people to this site to download.

You can see some examples of how to use the calendars on 3×5 cards to create a little organizational magic with some zip and pep.

I’m a huge fan of the little 3×5 index card. You may be familiar with using these to organize your life, popularized by the hipster pda and the philosophy behind Getting Things Done. There are many templates for cards that you can download for free, but they tend to be a bit bland for my taste.

I’m offering up some tutorials so that you can learn Photoshop techniques and create nifty 3by5 cards all in one. You’ll want to print these out in order to use them, so look below for printing instructions. The idea behind creating these cards is rather crafty. First, you’ll be practicing your Photoshop skills on a small, manageable project. Secondly, you’ll have tangible evidence of your Photoshop mastery. Thirdly, you’ll have gorgeous cards that will hopefully inspire you to become more organized.

There are so many ways to use these 3by5 cards. I use them to store bits of information that would otherwise get lost, including:

• MP3s I want to download from iTunes
• My son’s shoe size
• Serial numbers for software
• Quick ideas and small sketches
• Addresses and phone numbers
• URLs I want to visit
• Books I want to read
• Recipes

But the main reason I use them is to keep myself on track. Every day I write out a To Do list for the day, and pick the 3 most important things to get done for that day. If other tasks pop up, I write them down and keep them for another day so that I don’t get distracted.

Printing Your Magical Cards

You’ll want plain cardstock, in either white or a pale color that tickles your fancy. If your printer will print on 3 inch by 5 inch cards, you just need blank index cards. You won’t even need the rest of the instructions on this page

Printing Multiple Cards at Once

If your printer isn’t as flexible, you’ll want to buy a package of 8 1/2 x 11″ cardstock. Cardstock is just a fancy way of saying heavy paper. If you look at a regular index card, that’s cardstock weight paper. You’ll be able to print three cards per 8 1/2 x 11 page. If you’re very lazy, you can buy 8 1/2″ x 11″ cardstock by Avery or Oxford that has been perforated so that you can punch the cards out after you’ve sent the paper through your printer.

To print multiple cards, I’ve provided a template. Download the PDF template for printing 3by5 cards, and next open it in Photoshop. When you open the PDF, you’ll want to change the resolution to 200 pixels per inch. I’m using that as a guide because it’s low enough resolution that it won’t create huge file sizes, but high enough that your artwork should print out nicely. If you’ve included photos, or want better resolution for other artwork, you’ll want to work at 250 to 300 pixels per inch.

Once you’ve opened the PDF template, you’ll want to open the card or cards you’d like to print out. Copy the card by making sure that the image is flattened (Layer > Flatten Image). Next, select the card (use Ctrl + A on Windows, Command + A on the Mac), copy it (Ctrl + C on Windows, Command + C on the Mac).

Next, select the template file, and Paste (Ctrl+V on Windows, Command + V on the Mac). You’ll want to paste 3 copies, and align them using the template’s guidelines.

Now you’re ready to print. Select File > Print. Leave the settings as they are unless you’re using the perforated cardstock. If you’re using that, deselect Center and change the top setting to .5. This will make sure that your prinout matches the perforations on the page precisely.

This stuff is addictive, so make sure to print enough to share with others.

Trimming The Cards

You’ll need to trim with scissors (inaccurate) or use an xacto knife with a metal ruler on a self-healing mat.

Trimming may sound tricky, but it’s not. Stack the pages you’ve printed out so that they line up. You may want to use a binder clip to keep them together, but you can skip that step if you like.

Line up the ruler with the printed border of the card. Make sure your fingers are out of the way! We don’t want any artistic accidents here. Then use the Xacto knife to draw along the edge of the ruler. You may have to draw the knife across the line several times in order to cut, but don’t push down too hard on the knife. It’s better to use the Xacto knife several times rather than try to cut through a stack at once. Do this for each edge. If the blade gets dull, change it.

I’m totally uncoordinated, and I can do this just fine. As long as you don’t rush, I’m sure you can master this technique quickly. As I was telling my son, back in the old days before computers, everything was pasted up by hand which meant a lot of measuring, trimming, and pasting, which now makes us very grateful for how easy it is to draw a straight line in Photoshop without needing to use rulers, inks, pens, white gouache paint and razor blades (for mistakes).

There’s also something very satisfying about being able to do something tangible by hand, stacking the cards and straightening a nice pile of your handiwork. It’s a feeling you just don’t get with a pile of pixels at the end of the day.

This page offers a flexible, visual method to teach beginners the basics of HTML. You’ll need:

• basic HTML knowledge
• the PDF template (see below) and color printer
• magnetic sheets to print on (alternatives listed below)
• a whiteboard, large window, or blackboard to write on

When deciding to teach my youngest son how to write a web page from scratch, I thought about what might be the best way to approach it.

I first helped him memorize the order of the very basic web page tags. These are barked out in a military type fashion in order to keep things moving along. Marching is optional
HTML!

HEAD!

TITLE!

CLOSE TITLE!

CLOSE HEAD!

BODY!

CLOSE BODY!

CLOSE HTML!

To reinforce the order of these basic tags, I created some HTML magnets to use on a large white board we have at home. That reinforces the memorization and grouping of these tags, and introduces the idea of opening and closing tags, and nesting elements (the title tag goes within the head portion of the document). The BODY tag is larger than the others, because, since I’m teaching him how to design web pages, I wanted to demonstrate that that’s where most of the layout tags will go.

The structure of a web page, for someone who hasn’t any type of coding experience, often doesn’t make a lot of sense. Placing the magnets on a white board makes it much easier to demonstrate the structure, move tags around, etc. I’ve made some tags in two parts (three, if they have a closing tag) to allow things like adding a URL to an A HREF tag, or adding a class name to a tag. I also color coded the tags so that I could color code and match the css attributes when we started discussing style sheets.

I gave each tag a distinct color and shape. The first five tags are orange ovals. Links are gray rectangles, etc. I’m a very visual person, so having cues like color and shape to group and distinguish tags helps me a great deal. I was actually inspired to do this by a description of synesthesia, and how, a writer who had synesthesia experienced every letter on a page as a different color.

Printing the Magnet Templates

I’ve created two different PDF files with some basic HTML tags. You can buy magnets that you print on from an office supply store. The sheets are thin and easy to cut with regular scissors.

If you can’t print out the magnet paper with your printer, you could print the PDF file out on paper. You could then glue magnets to the back of it. You can buy inexpensive business card sized magnets for this purpose. If you have existing magnets, you can recycle them and use them in this project.

If you want to go the least expensive route, you could use a repositionable glue stick on a paper printout. This would turn your paper into post-it notes that you could use on any large surface and wouldn’t require a magnetic background. You could use a large window, or the side of a refridgerator, or a blackboard. (I would test any questionable surface to make sure the glue doesn’t leaves a mark behind).

Downloading the Magnet Templates

There are two sheets of magnets. If you use these, please give a link back to http://www.mccannas.com. Do not redistribute these files, but please point people to this web site instead.

Download the first HTML magnets PDF Template. This template includes magnets for all the main HTML document tags, headings, and DIVs. (Note: to download instead of letting your browser automatically open the PDF, Right-click and select Save Target As or Save Link As).

Download the second HTML magnets PDF Template, which includes magnets for links, paragraphs, spans and lists.

As our lives become more and more entwined with technology, the appeal of the handcrafted becomes stronger. This batch of free fonts all have very different looks, but a distinctly human appeal. I’ve selected five fonts that are the opposite of slick and high tech.

Yo, ho, yo, ho! This font has a decidedly piratical style. I can definitely imagine using this in an invitation to your Talk Like a Pirate Day party. Download Clerica here.

This is crusades, a blackletter font with a distinct handcrafted look. Download Crusades here.

Gartentika is a grungy, worn typeface you can download here.

Goombella looks as though it were rapidly drawn with an inky brush. There’s a sense of urgency and weight that would make this a great choice for a headline or heading. Download Goombella here.

HVD Bodedo has the very trendy look of a printed typeface that has been hand traced. It’s legible at a number of sizes, and has an informal feeling. Download HVD Bodedo here.