Flag Development for PotBS :: What I’ve Learned

Today, I’m going to share my thoughts and what I have learned about making flags for Pirates of the Burning Sea. A few notes of fair warning first: I’m not an artist and really don’t have that much experience within Photoshop. I do use Photoshop and I’ve messed around with it enough to know about layers and opacity but that is about it.

(If you don’t have Photoshop, there are several other options. I think almost all programs can do the stuff I talk about in this tutorial. I think they all do things a bit differently but I’ve gotten pretty one-sided in only using Photoshop so that is where all the references come from.)

With that background, I do think if you go through the site, you can see clear improvement. My goal here is to help other relative newbies figure how to get up to a pretty good level quickly.

First things first, the official forum has great references around:

Read the Stickies Here

I’m going to walk you through my learning curve. First things first, I started a few months back trying to make something. I pretty much failed. I tried to take big art and simply scale it down. That doesn’t work. I tried weathering the flag by hand, altering colors here and there and making parts darker and others lighter. If you aren’t an artist, that doesn’t work.

I’m not going to say that my flags are great. But I think they are acceptable and you can get to an acceptable level very quickly and very easily using a few rules and never trying or attempting to have an artistic flair.

First things first, expect it to take a bit of time to play around and figure out how stuff works. Even though the images are small, most of the betters ones are pretty tough to duplicate. Small doesn’t mean that a lot of work didn’t go into them. So I will walk you through making a decent appearing flag using a simple flag of a nation. *Runs off to Wikipedia and grabs the Scottish flag*

Ok, rule one. Work a bit bigger than the 128×85 dimensions. I work on something 3 times that size and then shrink it down for the final picture. It simply works much better to do the work on a bigger canvas. Zooming does NOT cut it. So that is my base image at 3 times the final product size.

Easy enough thus far. Now months ago, I would start trying to mess with the flag colors and “age” the flag and “desaturate” the flag and alter the contrast or brightness. You may need some of that, but rather, let’s focus on textures and layering. Again, I’m not an artist and simple is better. I went around my house and took pictures of stuff with different textures. I have about 20 now that I can use. Wallpapers, book covers, carpets, shirts, jeans, marble table tops, wood grains. Everyday stuff.

So here is my “old book cover” texture image. I’ll use this base image and crop it and add it as a layer to my flag.

Note: the great thing about this particular texture layer is that is “does” several things. First it brings in a fine cloth type pattern, and secondly it has faded inconsistencies so that it looks aged – actually it is aged as it is from the early 20th century. You can get this look through combining multiple textures but this one in particular is excellent due to accomplishing multiple actions in just one layer simply due to the original texture.

Simple overlay of the layers and turning the opacity down to 50 on the texture, you get this.

The three main things to do with layers are to alter the opacity (or strength of the overlay) and the style of the overlay (how it is applied to the lower layers) and finally alter the order of the layers. Adobe has lots of options for how to overlay the various layers. Play around – I don’t think there should be any hard fast rule – just scroll through them and pick what looks good. I think you will find a handful that you like the best. Again, this is simply normal which is the default with an opacity of 50%.

It is pretty good but you can see where the blue in the texture is altering the white and I want my white more white. Let’s adjust that texture layer. (The texture layer was “causing” the blue so go to the source – if you had altered the background, you’d also be affecting the blue within the Scottish flag and it was pretty good so let’s turn that blue texture to a gray scale type image.) Rather than a blue tint, let’s just desaturate it and make it gray. Simply select that layer and alter the color by setting Saturation to ZERO. Now you have something like this.

The scary part is that is a better flag than I could make in hours of doing hand techniques. Seriously. Textures are key. I spent a couple of weeks working on various flags and couldn’t figure out this basic technique. You have to use layers and probably multiple ones. Textures are everywhere in your home and a simple picture will get that look on your concept in seconds. I think you are better off if you use multiple textures so try multiple combinations. I have 20 in a folder – took them in about an hour. So rule 2 and 3 are textures and layering are ABSOLUTELY key.

If you want the picture brighter or darker, use an adjustment layer (small button above the layers). It is much better than actually adjusting the background. Try gradients for shadowing. Combine multiple gradients for more complex shadowing. I have a flag with well over 10 layers. For my final flag, I simply added one more texture. It is a wood grain and served to further age the flag and added a little warmth.

Ok, now you have the background. Next let’s cover some information regarding making small, low pixel count images. The best thing that I can say is find a reference image and then use a layer to create an outline of the art. Outlines shrink. Originals won’t. Pretend you’re in kindergarten and outline / trace / get an imprint of the picture you want. Then shrink that down. It is easier to edit and easier to fix something if you do it poorly. Trust me, originals won’t shrink and this step is critical to low-poly count art.

Here is an example showing the source art and the original tracing and the various layers that I used to build that really simple looking Fleur. I think it illustrates that when you see something “even simple” in these flags, they are often a bit more complex and take a bit more time than I thought when I started doing this a couple of months ago.

From this point, where the basic tracing is complete, make a new layer or layers. Use layers to add shading or add in additional details. If you mess up, it is easier to revert. I work in a DIFFERENT file for each individual piece to keep things simple. So I have a Fleur file and it has a layer for the tracing, a layer for the shadowing, a layer for highlights, and a layer for the background. Remember, changing the order of the layers and the type of overlap can have a significant effect. It is easier to play around with this approach than it is to be truly creative from a non-artist perspective.

Add the art and the flag is pretty much complete. That is a rough summary. I’d love to be able to tell you how to custom “tatter” the flag. Best I can tell, this really requires artistic talent and a lot of trial and error. It is very hard to get to a realistic appearing weathering pattern. I can get close by erasing small chunks and then smudging the texture around but I loose details in the surrounding flag and then have to clone the background and it becomes a labor intensive process and still very difficult.

I hope this helps a few or at least, saves you a few hours knowing where to spend time and where NOT to go. Good luck. Post your flags on the official forums. The members there have great eyes for looking at flags and quickly can point you in the right general direction.

To the High Seas!!