Last time, we converted our 3D rendering into vectors. We left off with a Photoshop file which we’re going to finish today with textures and shading.

First things first, I made a slight mistake in the last tutorial that I need to correct. Luckily, there’s a quick fix.

In the previous version of the graphic, I colored in the vectors with shading. This certainly makes the image more interesting, but shading so early not a good idea, as we can do it much better with Photoshop.

Dull, but fixed.

So, if you’re following along, go ahead and make all of your fills a neutral version of their base color. In my case, it’s mostly brown with a little light gray for the blade. When that’s done, export the file again and you’re ready to go for today’s tutorial.

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December is gift-giving time, and if you're not very organized indeed, late November/early December threatens to be characterized not by a pleasant anticipation of quality-time-to-come and a much-needed respite from work and research, but instead by a certain existential dread, or at least a rather more ontic version, most often directed at visions of the mall parking lot.

Being the vigilant (and vigilante) designers we are, Design less better organized in November under the auspices of creating some generative art for the holidays. We especially liked Jer Thorp’s idea of using letterforms as elements in a snowflake, but we wanted to personalize the results. In what even now we have to admit was a brilliant intuitive leap, we thought, "why not use the names of our loved ones? Then we can give them to our loved ones instead of going to the mall."

Once we knew we were making these as gifts, we decided we would digitally fabricate ornaments from our designs. This threw a structural requirement on top of the aesthetic one, but, remembering the mall, we plunged bravely forward.

A detail from a generated snowflake.

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