Making Order Out of Chaos in Photoshop

David Paget shared a nice video of making something out of chaos in Photoshop.

David Paget shared a nice video of making something out of chaos in Photoshop. The artist, inspired by a technique from Long Pham, showed how you can use Custom Shapes to create atmospheric concept art. You would probably not use this approach for professional work, but it’s still a nice way of looking at things.

I’ve been playing around with Custom Shapes in Photoshop and while I was digging into it, I stumbled across a video by Long Pham. In his video, he used Custom Shapes in quite an experimental way to lay down a lot of randomly placed shapes, and then tried find patterns within the shapes to create new compositions. I thought it was a great way to try and generate new compositions and I also like the approach of having no previous design ideas at the beginning of the process and just seeing what happens. So, I thought I’d give it shot!

I also applied a rule to myself which was to not use CTRL+Z at all during the process. CTRL+Z is a handy little shortcut, and I sometimes wonder if I’m overly reliant on back stepping my work and second-guessing myself a lot. Removing that tool really forced me to think about what I was doing and commit to my decisions. There were points during the process where I erased things out or deleted layers entirely, but I was trying to not rely on my muscle memory.

David Paget

And here is the original technique by Long Pham:

Making Order Out of Chaos in Photoshop

David Paget

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