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First we need to make our wire, please hang in here with me through the vector pen part. It’s not hard it is just confusing but you have to learn to make friends with it. Select the Pen tool with these settings making sure that Connect Segments is checked.
I clicked about 8 times across my page to complete my wire. When you have your line drawn, click once on any of the little node/squares. You will see an Arrow line pop up as shown below. Now we can pivot/smooth/adjust the shape of our line. The farther you drag this Arrow line out the farther the curve will be affected. You can move your nodes, up/down, left/right. It doesn’t show in a screen capture but your cursor also changes to a little two-way circular arrow.
When you have your wire shaped how you want it click the green Apply Button
You can change your vector properties after you complete your line as long as you keep it as a vector layer. I used a metal floor pattern fill selected in my material palette for my line color. I changed the stroke width to 18.
Now Duplicate your vector layer and convert it to a raster layer. You might want to duplicate this new layer a few times depending on how many wires you want to make.
After applying different Inner Bevels and settings, Eye Candy 3.0 Glass or Chrome. Basically you can use any plug-in that you have to add either an inner glow or bevel to your wires.
Here is collection of my different shadowed, beveled wires.
Image 1
Image 2
Another thing to keep in mind is, if you place one of these wires on top of another wire and adjust the blend modes you can really get some different looking wire effects.
Ex: The second wire (image 1) does not have a bottom darker shadow, I placed it over the yellow wire (3rd) and adjusted the blend modes. Now I have a darker gold wire on my 2nd wire in (image 2).
Ok another neat trick lets turn these wires to grey scale: Image>Grey Scale, then Image>Increase Color Depth>RGB 8-bits Channel. This wonderful because it saves your shadows, textures, bevels and highlights.
Grey Scale
Now by using the Manual Color Correction feature we can easily color our wires. You can also use the Change to Target Brush, Adjust Hue/Saturation> Colorize.
Change to Target Brush
Manual Color Correction
Ok I realize you might not want blue wires! But this is just an example hehehe
Colorize
The hardest part is to find the right gold, copper, silver color. With PSP we can choose colors from a web site but holding our cursor over our materials palette, click and hold the Control Key while moving your cursor to the web page you want to grab the color from. Here is a great page with many nice brown colors to choose from Pantone. Takes a little while to load. This is a screenshot of a scrolling window with hundreds of color choices.
Here is cheating at it’s finest. Find a photo on a photography site that looks like a rusted metal open it with PSP along with having your wire image open.
There are so many ways to add this rusted scratched photo to my wire that I hope you would know how to do this. Use as a pattern fill, paste to selection are just a couple quick few ways.
Now place the new filled wire over the bottom wire and adjust the blend modes.
Turns the above wire into one that is really varied and wonderfully real looking when it’s totally not zoomed in!
Learn how to create beads for your wires HERE
Tracey
*First published in TidBytes Jan 2007*
© Copyright by Scrapbook-Bytes.com
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