Transparency is a quick and easy way to give visual interest and depth to your artwork.  Let’s create a very simple 3 minute peacock to illustrate this.

Create an ellipse and  fill it with a multicolored gradient.  Use the Convert Anchor Point Tool  to remove the curve from the anchor point on either end of the ellipse, as seen below.  This will create the feather shape for our peacocks tail feathers.

Now use your Rotate Tool  to fan out the feathers in a half circle like below.  For more info on how to do this see the tutorial, Quick and Easy Flowers in Illustrator.

Apply a thin stroke to the feathers to distinguish them from each other.

You will see that the fan of feather still looks a bit one dimensional.  Let’s use our transparency palette to change that!  Select all of your feathers and set them to 50% transparency.
You will see that instantly our feathers seem to have much more layering and depth.  Now play a bit with your transparency blend modes and check out all the cool ways the transparency palette can change the look of your feathers.  You can see a few examples below.





Now with the use of some very simple shapes, we can create the body of our peacock.

Now choose your favorite blend mode for your fan of feathers, color up your body to match and put them together for your 3 minute peacock.
   

Sometimes you might find that you want to have text cut out of a shape, rather than placed on top of it.  This allows for the colors and/or patterns on the layer behind the shape to show through the letters.  You have a two options for doing this in Illustrator…both of which are quick and easy.

First, create you shape.  I am using a plain black rectangle as seen below.

 Next, place your text on top of your shape.  

Once you have it positioned where you want to cut it out, with the text selected, create outlines of the text by going to the Type menu and choosing Create Outlines.  The text will no longer be editable once you do this – so be sure it reads correctly.

 Now you have two options on how to proceed in cutting or knocking the text out.

OPTION ONE

With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Pathfinder palette and click on the Divide icon.  This will divide the overlapping areas into separate shapes.  Then select any of the letter shapes and delete.  this will remove the overlapping area and leave a “hole” through the shape.

Delete all of the divided letter shapes, and you are left with your orginal shape with “holes” where all of the letters used to be.

 OPTION TWO

 With both the outlined text and the shape selected, go to your Shape menu and make a Compound Path.  This will make the two shapes into a single shape, leaving any overlapping areas as negative space. 

Now you can take your shape with cutouts and place it on top of other layers and what is behind it will show through!

This is an advanced tutorial. I am using Photoshop CS2, a.k.a. Photoshop 9.0.2. on a PC.

Today we’ll be drawing fire in Photoshop. You can draw this on a blank canvas, but to get the full effect, I suggest you start with a photo. I am using this picture:

Step 1. Fireball
Add a New Layer.
Select a soft paintbrush in a medium size (I startd with 40).
Using a brick-orange color, make a dot.
Make another dot with a slightly lighter color and slighty smaller brush size (30).
Make another dot with a slightly lighter color and slighty smaller brush size (20).
Last time: Make another dot with a slightly lighter color (peachy/yellow now) and slighty smaller brush size (10).

Using the Smudge Tool in a small, soft size, click somewhere inside your dot, hold and drag it up. Repeat this to make fire tongues coming up out of your dots. Try making them “S” shaped. You can also change the Strength of the smudge tool to vary the effect. (Mine is about 65% and I avoid the lightest color area in this step.) Here are my settings:

Step 2: Fire’s Glow
Now we’ll add a soft glow around the fire.
Go into Quick Mask Mode (Q), select a big, soft brush (I used 80), and click. The brush selection should be aligned with the bottom-middle of your fire, going up and out from there.

Leave Quick Mask Mode (Q), and you will have a circular selection on your canvas. Right click and Select Inverse. Select your photo layer, and a Color Balance Adjustment Layer.

Adjust the midtones and highlights as shown:

Step 3: Making Sparks Fly
Now we’ll prepare our brush to add some sparks to the fire.

With those settings, add a new layer, choose a medium orange from your fireball with the eyedropper and draw some sparks over the fire. Lower the Opacity of this layer (in my case it is 60%). Then drag the layer down so it overlays the top 1/3 of your fireball.

Step 4: Finishing touches
Change again to regular soft brush, use #ffff66 color (or similar light yellow), select a new layer, and make a bright dot inside of it.
Again, I lowered the opacity of this layer to 60%.
Right click on this layer for your blending option and select Outer Glow.

Now use your smudge tool just a bit to give this layer a teardrop shape. Here is my final image: