Carved Stone

Mini-tutorial from Ross Macintosh on carved slate effect.

I've posted a zoomed image below that I hope clarifies these tips.

I started out by drawing a rectangle with no line colour and a dark grey fill. I converted it to an editable shape and then used the freehand tool to modify its edge to be less rectilinear. I cloned the shape, sent it to back, resized it bigger, edited its shape slightly, and changed its fill to be a fractal plasma fill comprised of two tones of grey. I then selected the original shape and gave it a slight feather. To make it look more like stone I cloned the top shape, filled it white, and gave it a linear transparency. That transparency added a gentle highlight to the lower part of the stone. That was cloned and the transparency changed to eliptical. It was positioned to provide a slightly diagonal highlight - again quite transparent for a gentle effect. To finish the stone I cloned the furthermost back (larger) shape filling it solid black and then using ctrl-shift-b repeatedly to position it directly above the backmost shape. Applying a linear transparency, it was possible to add a shadowing effect to the edge of the stone. I then cloned that shape, sent it to back and then applied a drop shadow to look like the stone was casting a shadow. I then grouped the whole bunch. It was the stone.

Next I zoomed in, and using the freehand tool, I drew dozens of fine scratch lines. These were a lighter grey colour and I applied transparency to get them just right. I tried to mix long strokes with some short ones. Using the same colour I then applied text. It was then beveled to give the engraved look. I used a lot of contrast and a light angle as if light was coming from above. The elevation was set to something like 30 degrees.

The image was finished off with a background. Like a good boy I posted it to the forum hoping it might give someone ideas.

I hope that wasn't too hard to follow. I should note that I've noticed that any grungy fonts seem to really slow down the bevel tool. The font I used has many nodes if converted to editable shapes. When I beveled the font the redraw crawled slower than Big Frank's tortoise! It took much will power to keep from ctrl-alt-deleting it out of existance. If you try it have patience.

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