July 13, 1996


Christian Void of Killing Floor asked me to do a banner graphic for his morphine.com page. He said he wanted a black background with maybe a little blue, and the words "morphine.com" in a broken, nicked, old typewriter font. Oh, yeah, and some rusty razor blades scattered behind it. I'm always up for a challenge.

I got some razor blades, but they were shiny and new -- nowhere near rusty. I soaked them in lemon juice and vinegar to eat through the coating a bit (I got cheap store-brand ones so the coating wouldn't be too resistant). Then I sprinkled them with lemon juice and set them in the sun for a while to bring out the corrosion detail. I then laid them on a transparency, covered them with black velvet and scanned them into PhotoShop, where I adjusted the hue to make them look rusty.

The background is actually scanned, wrinkled aluminum foil, colorized to blue, then darkened with the brightness/contrast controls. I selected the black background of the razor blades, then inverted to select only the blades and cut and pasted them onto the blue/black background. Where there were sections between blades that remained black (and didn't show the blue variations in the background), I used the rubber stamp tool, defining my source point on the original background image, then stamping this pattern onto the image with the blades.

I then placed a black "shadow" image of the "morphine .com" text on top of the razor blade image (It's mostly obstructed by the white text, but if you look close, you can see it. It wasn't to be a very important part of the image, anyway.). Using the perspective effect, I pulled the top of the image inward, so that it looks as if it is receding into the distance. Then I placed the white text (which, btw, came like that. It's called "Crudfont.") and scaled it to match up with the shadow text behind it.

Viola! Christian seemed pretty happy with it, and I had fun. And I didn't even cut myself like I was almost sure I would. I'm usually an accident waiting to happen.

Go on to next page o' GRAPHIC DISASTER


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