You’ve just unwrapped your brand new Wacom drawing tablet, but what’s next? Here’s a roundup of super useful articles and tutorials that take you through the process of setting up your pen tablet and give you tips and techniques on to create some great looking illustrations or paintings.

Setting up your Wacom tablet

How to Choose a Graphics Tablet that Fits Your Needs

How to Set up Your Wacom for Awesome Results

Wacom Settings In Illustrator

Intuos Pen Tablet Settings & Preferences

Illustrating with your Wacom

A Pseudo-Sugar Skull: From Start to Finish.

Drawing Skulls with a Wacom Tablet

Electric Zombie Tee and Video

How to Design Your Own Custom Hoodie

How to Draw Your Own Vector Wings

Create A Grisly Zombie Illustration With A Pen Tablet

Discover tattoo illustration techniques

How to Create a Three Color Wolf Skull in Illustrator

How to Create a Cartoon Character with Expressive Lines

Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Tutorial with a Wacom Tablet

How to Draw a Classic Hand using a Graphics Tablet

Painting with your Wacom

How to Draw a Portrait in Photoshop

Digital Painting Tutorial

Create a Rebellious Skateboarder Using Digital Painting Techniques

Old style pin-up art… The new way

Advanced Tutorial: Creating ‘Broken Link’

Painting fantasy eyes

Suberb Tutorial of Digital Painting President Obama

Wonder Woman Pin Up Digital Painting

How to Enhance Photos With a Pen Tablet

It’s funny how trends reappear through the years. The bright and shiny chrome text effect could be found everywhere in the 80s, then it disappeared altogether when people realised how hideous and gaudy it was. Recently though, this text styling seems to be making a comeback in the world of digital art as the 80s generation are implementing inspirations from their childhood into their designs and artworks. Follow this tutorial to recreate the epic metal text effect for yourself, making use of modern day digital design techniques in Photoshop.

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1980′s Inspiration

WWF Wrestling, Metallica’s Ride the Lightning album, Robocop, Amiga games and Transformers are all examples that I can relate to. As a little initial research, collect a few logos and graphics to refer to when creating your own text effect. Look closely at the colours used, the style of text and what seems like a desert landscape in the reflection of the text.

We’ll begin in Illustrator for the first couple of steps to lay out our type. Set out the wording of your choice in an appropriate font and convert the text to outlines (CMD+Shift+O). Here I’m using the font Viper Squadron, and the word ‘Epic’.

With the shapes selected, go to Object > Path > Offset Path. Enter 3mm in the options box. Right click on the objects and select Ungroup.

Add a couple of basic gradient fills to the two shapes to make it easy to identify them. A sky blue to white on the inner shape and a red to blue gradient on the outline will do the trick.

Draw a temporary rectangle around the text, then select this along with the outer shape. Paste the objects into Photoshop. Repeat the process but this time with the inner shape. The temporary rectangle will maintain the proportions between the two objects when copied through to Photoshop.

Double click the inner shape layer and begin adding some layer styles. Start by replacing the fill with a Gradient Overlay. Use dark blue (#426bc7), light blue (#719cff) and white (#ffffff) swatches and run the gradient vertically from the top.

Next, add a soft Inner Glow using a mid-blue (#76a5cd), set the opacity to 100%, blending mode to Normal, size to around 8px and add a 2px stroke to accommodate the stroke in the next step.

Add a 2px stroke in white, then set the alignment to the Inside and blending mode to Color Dodge. Adjust the opacity to around 60%.

Hold the CMD (Mac), or CTRL (Windows) key while clicking the thumbnail of the inner-text layer to load the selection. Grab the Rectangular Marquee tool and hold Alt while dragging a selection across the upper portion of the text, leaving just the lower half selected. Fill this with white on a new layer.

Double click the layer to open up the layer styles and add a vertical gradient running from dark indigo (#261528) to mid-indigo (#241e53) to white (#ffffff) to a very light indigo (#b6b4c7).

Zoom right in and draw a circular selection at each end of the reflection gradient layer on each letter.

Use the rectangular marquee tool to remove the middle portion between each circle. Repeat the process on every other letter.

Load the selection of the reflection layer, then go to Select > Modify > Contract. Enter 2px to reduce the mask size to accommodate the stroke, then inverse the selection (CMD+Shift+I) and delete.

The text is beginning to develop some definition with the gradients and stroked outlines. Now let’s start work on the chamfered edge.

Zoom in and draw around each edge of the outer outline with the Polygonal Lasso tool. Close the path by cutting diagonally across the outline at each corner. Fill each edge with white on individual layers.

Add a simple black to white gradient on one of the shape layers. Right click the layer and select Paste Layer Style, then select all the other layers and paste the same layer style.

The gradient is running in the wrong direction on the horizontal shapes, so tweak each one by adjusting the angle of the gradient fill.

Repeat the process on every other letter. Aim to contrast black against white on each shape to highlight the diagonal edge lines.