[Tennis] davenewt vs. SharkShark

hey i have added you to my messanger, look forward to speaking with you, and thanx

LOL SharkShark you're publically putting your contact info on this forum hopefully you won't get bombarded with spam lol or me messaging you haha

Feel free to message me anytime! My Messengers are always open to you

//lol on a side note, I don't really care, I don't have enough friends on my messenger list so what the heck.

I'm taking that as invitation then.. talk to u online in a couple of hours when I get myself outta work!

Dave?! Where ya at man! Can't wait to see what you come with as the final volley!

Hey SharkShark, nice volley - I did wonder what you'd come up with!

I'll have to postpone work on my last volley until 2005 ...as I'm currently away from home and due to be in New York in a couple of days for New Year!

In the meantime, hope ye are all having a great festive season!

Later!
Dave

Okay folks, the final volley has arrived -- No Longer Alone --



Now, there's not a lot to explain behind the thinking of this one. As nobody would like to be 'alone at Christmas', I thought I'd use that thought as the basis for a promotional campaign for stamps - but what could the stamps be *of*? Well, what else but the previous volleys. They make a good collection

--Making the stamps:

I used the grid in photoshop along with the pen tool to create symmetrical arcs as shape layers. Then duplicated them, rotated some and formed the outline of a stamp. I initially had all the individual arcs filled with colour, which I didn't want (I wanted the part within the arcs to be filled) - so I created a rectangle to surround the arcs, and used the 'subtract from shape area' tool to create a stamp outline filled on the inside. I then added a 1px grey stroke and a soft shadow (via layer effects).

--Filling the stamps:

After duplicating the stamp shape to make 7 stamps, I opened all the previous volley JPGs and resized to 135px square so they'd fit nicely. Bringing them all in on separate layers, I positioned them over the stamp outlines and held down Alt while clicking on the stamp shape layer in the layers palette to load the stamp shape as a selection.

Ctrl-I inverted the selection (therefore selecting all the image which lay outside of the stamp shape - the active layer during this process was the image for the stamp, not the stamp itself).

A 'Select > Modify > Contract > 1 pixel' operation followed by a swift press of the Delete key got rid of the bits of the image outside the stamp, whilst leaving the 1px stroke visible to border each image.

--Background:

For a background, I just used a solid blue fill and added some Noise to give it a non uniform colour. Then used the same stamp shape, this time filled with a dark blue and rotated slightly, copied numerous times and resizing individually to cover the background. I then applied different opacities to these dark blue filled stamps, to give a little variation to the background.

--Text:

Finally, I put some text on the stamps for the prices (10p to 70p - volleys 1 to 7 respectively) (yes, I'm English!) and overlaid the advertisement text. I used Frutiger, stretched horizontally and had to mess with the character spacing on some of the lines in the middle to get the paragraph to 'justify' to both left and right margins.

I put these main text layers in Soft Light mode, and duplicated the top and bottom, adding a soft outer glow to the duplicates to make the header and footer text stand out a little more. I also duplicated just the 'alone' part of the header to make this stand out a touch more.

--Finally:

Oh, and I only used the word 'renowned' because it fitted nicely, honest! No offence intended to you SharkShark, but I can't justifiably include myself in that category!

And the frame is just a 1px yellow fill dropped on top in Exclusion mode.

So there you have it. Match over I guess? *sob* Such a shame, I was really enjoying it! Oh well, must do it again sometime!

Would really appreciate any constructive criticism anyone might have on any of my volleys... this being my first match I hope I didn't let the side down, so to speak!

Thanks SharkShark... and Ozzu... and pixfiles.net for letting me host my volleys somewhere!

Cheers all,
Dave

nice one dave, nice idea

Beautiful finish to a great match dave! I enjoyed it, and look forward to another match in the future! At the rate you are going "Renowned" will fit you too