Beketov

Wanted to put something together for one of our new members. Took some inspiration from Frank and ran with my own style on it. Wish the BG was coming out as detailed as it is in photoshop but maybe I can just see more on a dark background. This has the brightness cranked way up just to look close to right.

Says the guy putting all his faith in a week old player with 6 games played :P

Won't hear me complain about shutting out the leagues best team

Text is mind-boggling. Effects and BG are lacking a bit IMO.

The colouring is on point here, nice use of browns and greens. Lighting could us a bit of work, seems to be coming in from everywhere. I'm also not sold on the blending. The weird has tag lines help but they can't do a full blend on there own. needs some extra stock work of blurring to make it pop better. Text is pretty good but might have a little too much going on so it's a bit distracting, especially with it's position directly below the render's face. I would move it right a bit and get rid of a few lines of the stuff in behind it.

First off, love the effects and the text. They look absolutely sick. Second, that lighting is mind-boggling. His face looks professionally lit which I have my doubt that it actually was. My main concern is the blending of those two things together. Basically, the light is hitting his face on the right side of the sig. However the light sources I can distinguish are all on the left. Lighting on text like that looks amazing, don't get me wrong, but it should affect the render a bit more. If the render was on the left and the text on the right I think this problem would mostly be gone. I also wonder if a bit more could have been done with the BG. Kinda looks like 1 stock + 1 effect. It works, I just think it could work a little bit better.

Hey look it's me! I like the idea behind the effects and stuff you have going on but the execution could just be a tad better. get some curves and exposure layers in there to blend everything together a little more and I think it would help a lot. The effects blend well into the render but the text and the BG stick out like sore thumbs. Ideally I always look at sigs as "could this be a taken photo if physics went wonky and text appeared in thin air" It sounds weird but it works. basically what I mean is that you want to see effects but you also want to have everything seem like it occupies the same space. Proper exposure and depth is the best way to do this. That was a bit longer than I was planning on that but oh well. Aside from the above I would suggest blending the text a bit more, having the lighting effect the render a bit more (curves layers clipped to the render help a lot with this) and darkening the whole thing up a little bit so that the lighting and effects really pop.

Tim made some really valid points above so I'm going to try and give different things you can work on. The render placement is definitely of major concern though so follow his tips regarding that. My main concerns with that aside is the colouring and the text. More advanced concepts can come later but getting good colour flow and text can really take sigs up a level. First off, use colours that mesh well together and make sure that they don't contrast too much. Right now the BG in this has a pink and orange thing going on (where it isn't way over-exposed at least) and the render is green. This confuses the eye and makes it hard to pin down a focal point unless you give it another way to do so. It's a matter of knowing what works so that you can branch out into techniques that normally shouldn't like crazy colours. For this one I would suggest using some exposure layers to blend everything together a bit better and maybe using different stokes or re-covering the ones you did use so that the work better with the render. Remember, it's not about using the exact same colour but rather about using colours that look good together. The text, as mentioned, is my other main issue. The font choice is iffy but that's low on the concerning factor. What I want to bring up is the placement and the effects. Putting text in the corner of a sig makes it look like an afterthought and it draws attention away from the render. Both are big no-noes. Get the text higher up and more over the render to make it work well with your render choice. Effects are trickier to master but a good rule of thumb is to avoid the effects window (at least I think that's what its called, I don't use it). That's where you got the stroke and emboss effects from. Those effects have their uses but they should not be put on text IMO. It just makes things look awkward. Go for clean text and work with colours, stocks, lighting, blending, etc to make it pop more. These effects do nothing but make me distracted.

Effects and colours are on point, as I would expect from you. Everything blends really well together except the face. i see what you were going for with the B&W head and it works a lot of the time but I find it sticks out a lot in this one. I think it's because of how much the other colours in the piece pop so desaturation really stands out. I would think if you want B&W to work there maybe play with a curves layer to help bring the brightness of his head down in line to match the other parts of the piece. I would also get the left side of the sig a tad bit more out of focus so it plays with the depth as well as the right does but I get GFX boners for blurring so that's probably why.

It would have been pretty darn easy to change the spelling. However making a Czech player and using an English spelling of the name didn't seem to make any sense to me. Besides, are you really complaining about ease of pronouncing my name? I'm one of the few members who finds European names that AREN'T impossible to say haha.

Very solid first game of my career, I'll take it.

I do what I can :)

I've known this was coming for a bit now but it feels nice to finally see it. I enjoyed my time with Cologne, just as I enjoyed my time with the many teams I was apart of over the past 8 seasons; however it just feels right to come back to the team that drafted me for one final cup run. I want to thank everyone in Cologne for 1.5 great seasons and Greg especially for giving me a chance to compete, especially with Helsinki. Now to see if I can end my career on a high.

It's officially Monday the 7th which means it's time for me to finally let Miller go. This was the first time I've ever had a player go all 8 seasons so it was a hell of a ride. I never got as much TPE as I was hoping but managed to get 825 which is my personal record I believe so I can be happy with that. Also never got any personal awards but that's nothing new. I got my cup, that's what I care about. Thanks to all the teammates that have helped along the way. I did a lot of team jumping so I've played with many of you. It's been a blast to prove I can still create a decent forward, even if I have never managed to figure out how to get more goals than assists haha. Anyway, this is getting too long. New player will be created later today when I'm not on my phone.

I don't have much in the way of textures. Mostly use stocks that you gave awhile ago actually haha. Best I could offer is some PSD's or a tutorial

If you want any of my things for the pack (for some reason) give me a shout and I'll donate. As far as what I'd like to see, anything from you should be pretty awesome.

If this generation for us was any indication it wouldn't be much of a battle TPE wise haha

I guess so? Although usually it's goaltender in hockey and goalkeeper in soccer. In any case, yeah, I'm going goalie. Shouldn't be too shocking. Aside from White I have always gone back and forth between forward and goal.

I think my internet slang is lacking a bit...

For my next player who's coming tomorrow.

Even longer since the last time I made a sig on my macbook but I was on a bus so it got the job done haha. CnC?

2 spaces has been fucking me up since we changed it. I got very comfortable with smacking return twice to great paragraphs long before you were even here. I demand 1 space back!

I don't know anything about PC's so try some of the stuff suggested to you by others first. However, if you need warranty work done what you do is call the company up, Acer in this case, and they'll send you a shipping box. You pack he computer up in that and ship it to them. Generally it's all pre-labelled so the shipping is free. They'll fix it and send it back. Thats how I handle all my warranty work. Almost never worth it to get one of the Best Buy ones or whatever because they usually don't add much. It's convenient sure but they love to find ways out of helping you so you pay a bunch extra to barely get anything. Better to deal direct with the company.

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