1000 Years of Deke’s Techniques by Deke McClelland

1000 Years of Deke’s Techniques
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– Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to 1,000 Years of Deke’s Techniques. Sounds far-fetched, right? I know, right? But also 1,000% true, right? Which is why today I bring you the 1,000th episode of Deke’s Techniques, which according to my self-published “McClelland Book of World Records” is the longest-running internet thing in the history of the internet. How to celebrate? In a form of a kind of clip show, my favorite Deke’s Techniques of all time. Finally, me celebrating me. I mean, wow, that has got to be a big moment for you. Early type techniques. It all began at the outset of the last ice age, January 4th, 2011, befittingly with ice type. And then there was type branded into the likes of burlap or leather. There was fancy lustrous gold type followed by industrial heavy metal type, and then when you least expected it, molten letters set on fire! And that was just the first five weeks. Later type techniques. In 1,000 years since, type remained a major feature of Deke’s Techniques. Think grass type complete with a golf ball, type reflected in water and then reflected right back, spray-painted stencil type with realistic-looking drips, chisel type, like in Ancient Rome, and super intricate, but not very difficult embroider type. Or how about one of my personal favorites, smoky type? And who can forget secret message type, here expressed as an animated GIF? Oh, my goodness, I’m getting mesmerized. We went all the way to Middle Earth for hobbit type, only to later discover a 3D ring of authentic Elvin runes. And behold my take on the classic MCU with the introduction of The Blue Barbeque, complete with hand-drawn letters. Pop culture. But when push comes to shove, it’s not all about type. I drew inspiration for this ribbed glass effect from the cover for Madonna’s “MDNA.” This free-floating work of geometry is a riff off the video for “Leave It Alone” by Broken Bells. As for this, the world’s most alluring subwoofer, look no further than a cover for “Sirens” by Real Life. How about games? I showed you how to draw a double-bladed Minecraft ax, rendered here in 3D. We added a new character to Angry Birds who zaps pigs into bacon, and then eats the bacon. I invented a much-needed boss for the classic game Castle Crashers, The Curious Necrowalrus. Take it from me, every episode of Deke’s Techniques is as packed with useful information as these ideas are modestly insane. Blockbuster movies. Say, do you like movies? Well, sure you do, in which case, here’s some Indiana Jones type, complete with ultra-condensed Warichu movie credits. What about an old-fashioned Star Wars-style hologram? Yes, they’re standing on a car seat. Make up your own backstory. And while I never saw “Wonder Woman 1984,” I got to say, it made for one great Photoshop effect. Not a big DC fan? Me neither. Well, then we’re off to Marvel for a look at Captain America’s indestructible stars and stripes shield, not to mention the freaky mirror multiverse worlds of Doctor Strange, plus, as an added bonus, glimpse the hideous face of the arch villain Kaecilius. And what tour of the MCU would be complete without “Avengers: Infinity War,” in which all those poor super people disintegrated into ashen flakes of skin, or was it skinny flakes of ash? I’ve always wondered. If you like “E.T.,” I made this. If you prefer “Jurassic Park,” try this one on for size. Oh, wait, you like both. I guessed that about you, which is why I came up with The Rextra-Terrestrial. My favorite, HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And despite all this soft, incredibly accurate shading, this is 100% an Illustrator document. Memes and stuff and junk. You like a good meme? Look, there’s me. I got a nose, and now there’s a mutant ninja turtle on my nose. And ha-ha, did you ever notice that every duck beak is secretly a dog face? Really, it’s true. Lucky for you, you didn’t make the confusing mistake of being born a dog-faced duck. Here’s a guy whose head is too big, and here’s that same guy, but now his head is too small. There really is no end to what you can do with a little talent and the liquefy filter. The director of this very movie, Jacob Cunningham, once created a pool hall scene starring 12 versions of himself, all captured with a single camera, a single tripod, a single strobe, and a single Jacob that he ultimately assembled into this gem of a composition. What do you say to a little Photoshop forgery? This 1918 airmail stamp is worth maybe 100 bucks, but spin the middle upside down, and you have what’s known as an Inverted Jenny, which last sold for 1 1/2 million dollars. And just for fun, here’s one where I teach you how to add a banana tool to Photoshop, which is not so much a technique as a complete and utter waste of time. Isometric projections. Now, as you may know, Photoshop lets you render real 3D, as in the case of this rocket ship or this scalloped hammerhead shark. But even better, we covered something that’s kind of 3D, but way more reliable, isometric drawing in Illustrator. First, I taught you by far the best way to draw a cube, and then I showed you how to arrange that cube into a larger cube of cubes. I later arranged those versatile cubes to form an impossible Penrose triangle, not to mention this eye-catching object here, which I don’t know what it is, so I dubbed it the Cubical Gobstopper. Obsessive pattern making. I love a seamlessly-repeating tile pattern, one that can go on and on without any indication of where it might begin. And by definition, it’s impossible to find out where it might end. It’s just like life, only endless, which life clearly is not. Here’s an early pattern of ribbons I created as a kind of festive gift wrap. Have I showed you that face that I rendered in type? No? Well, I rendered that same face in a pattern as well. Here, we created a riff on a classic Amish quilt. This proletariat pattern looked like it might appear on the wall in a subway, which I quite like. Prefer something more organic? Who’s hangry for honeycomb? I’m so nuts for patterns that in 2019, I dedicated 10 straight weeks to what I called the seamlessly-repeating summer. It got a little garish at times, but what a wonderful summer it was. My favorite pattern was also the most complex. It’s based on a Tunisian stained glass window design, and it took me literally days to figure out, days, I tell you, days. Oh, and one more to meditate on, this elaborate mandala pattern created using brush symmetry in Photoshop. Your results and mine will very thankfully vary. End-of-year holidays. Here in the United States, the holiday season kicks off in late November with Thanksgiving and continues more or less to the end of the year. I’ve been known to have too much fun with turkeys, hand turkeys, that is, in which you really actually trace your hand and articulate it, which can be a useful exercise in and of itself. Then you turn it into a turkey. Really, truly, with time and a little imagination, there’s no end to the variety of hand turkeys that you can create, which is why I call hand turkeys the most versatile art form of our time. Then for the December holidays, I created this simple snowflake using nothing but straight lines in Illustrator and then enhanced it to perfection inside Photoshop. Here, we have the ultimate winter wonderland, with a few flakes got on the lens for good measure. And one very special holiday, I fulfilled a little boy’s dream by making him fly. Oh, Photoshop, you pixel-based, non-denominational miracle. Halloween. Holidays come and go, but in 1,000 years, I’ve never skipped Halloween, and that’s because Halloween offers a chance to create something very scary. For example, we’ve got this zombie dude, whose mask is more horrifying than he is, or still more zombies, enhanced from an actual photograph. I made this headless stranger in the mist followed later by a woman whose head and supporting infrastructure are all too apparent. A regular kid waiting in line at an amusement park became fodder for a dark elf. Here, I combined a bat-faced moon, sorry, I’m told this one takes a moment, with a bright, cheerful house. No, okay, a haunted mansion. That makes more sense. And here’s another type technique, dripping ghost letters that turn into green slime. The ultimate Halloween trick, how to draw a cat’s eye entirely from scratch and then turn it into a dragon’s eye. Oh, and remember the snowflake? Even better, scare-flakes. Ha, scare-flakes, that’s my word! I made that up. Famous artists. I especially like using Photoshop and Illustrator to simulate the work of the great masters. Now, everyone riffs on Andy Warhol, but I promise you, my riffs are the best. I took a swing at Joan Miro, even daring to create this Miro movie mashup. And with varying degrees of success, I took on the likes of French pointillist George Seurat, the American photo realist Chuck Close, the Dutch illustrator M.C. Escher, and the 16th century German printmaker Albrecht Durer. To be honest, that last one’s just an auto-tracing in Illustrator, and the original is by a guy named Enea Vico after Durer was already dead. But Vico hangs in the Met, so it’s real art. Anyway, I think I had the most fun riffing on Roy Lichtenstein, complete with Ben-Day dots. And of course, who can forget that episode where I showed you how to draw the Mona Lisa entirely from scratch and sell it and make a squillion dollars in one easy afternoon. What episode was that again? Oh, wait, I never got around to that one! Guess I’ll just have to save it for the next millennium. Photography and processing. As I like to say, I am not a photographer, but in 1,000 years, I couldn’t help but take a few pictures. And what I lack in photographic prowess, I make up for in Photoshop. This one time, I got in a tank with some great white sharks. I tell you, I’ve never felt so alive. Here’s my wife Colleen looking drab and then sensational at White Sands, New Mexico. Here, at Arches National Park, I took some of the color out of the photograph. Whereas in this sunset right here, I put the color right back in. In the case of this HDR image, I shot multiple exposures and developed them inside Camera Raw. This isn’t my photo, well, obviously, but I developed it from a mirror JPEG by invoking the best of the Lab color space. Here’s a kind of infrared snow effect before and then after. Now, I kind of liked this photo of the London Underground, but I loved it after the addition of a vibrance layer and a few passes of high pass. And do you remember the 2017 solar eclipse? Well, Colleen and I drove to Alliance, Nebraska and captured these all by ourselves, with an assist from a friendly rancher who let us shoot from his pasture instead of resorting to nearby Carhenge. Underwater, I captured this poisonous and very tiny blue-ring octopus as well as these rambunctious and ultimately classically-rendered collection of sea lions. Logos. The first time I took on a logo for Deke’s Techniques involved the Adobe Creative Cloud itself, with its two opposing Cs. The next was a symmetrical logo star inspired by the great folks at United Pixelworkers. Remember those isometric cubes from just a few minutes ago? Well, thanks to them, I was able to assemble this continuous beam bent into a cube-shaped logo. I just love this so-called wrapped logo because it requires real investment from its audience. Here’s a curious ring logo that I fit together, one carefully-executed link at a time. But the coup de resistance is the animal logo, whose story awaits you from bison to triceratops in episode 983. But do yourself a favor and hang out for the entire story. You’ll be glad that you did. Graphic art. Can I just say, the episodes we’ve seen so far are great and everything, but the ones devoted to graphic art are my favorite. You know those head cuts made famous by “The Wall Street Journal?” Not only did I come up with a way to create them inside Photoshop, first in black and white and then in color, but I also figured out how to automate the process with an action. And if that’s not enough, I showed you how to convert a photographic image to a credible line drawing. Then, not satisfied, I revisited the technique and made it even better. Want to trace a good-looking custom avatar? Sure you do. Or maybe you prefer to take on one of those big-headed photographic caricatures, complete with a new background and some graphic shading. Or how about this celebration of color in repeating rainbow faces, which culminates in this symmetrically-faced trio? I can’t stop looking at them. Have you ever tried your hand at a custom emoji? Here, we see Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous emoji, which I presented in five episodes packed into a single week, or an authentically angry emoji, not just a little grumpy, but really super cheesed at the world. Ranking among my more calming graphic techniques were the flowering vectors, which came to take on a more origami appearance over the fullness of time. Once, I actually dreamed a technique, this is true, and emerged from that dream to create this effect in waking clarity. And seriously, if you do nothing else, drop everything, even the breakable stuff, and check out the various ways to create this flawless hyper-realistic neon sign. Wrapping up 1,000 years. During my time with Deke’s Techniques, I have covered Adobe’s device apps, including Fresco, which I love, Photoshop, which is charitably a work in progress, and Illustrator, which is actually quite good. Plus, I devoted episodes to the actual real, very first Photoshop 1.0 and the equally actual real, very second Illustrator 88. Much thanks to my one-time producer Max Pixley Smith. Trying to install old-timey floppy disk software on modern day hardware is the stuff of madness, mad genius madness. But that’s not all. That’s just not all. In Photoshop, I showed you how to create organic water droplets as well as synthetic wood grain, you wouldn’t know it, but using very similar techniques. I taught you how to combine people from different group shots as well as remove people you don’t want. At one point, I taught you how to draw a cool, but inaccurate Mobius strip, but then later, I mended my ways, and I delved into ambigrams. And now, for the truly important stuff. I showed you how to create a tiny planet. I taught you how to defy gravity. We observed the war of the worlds from a safe distance. I showed you how to find your way to the nearest space portal. And in addition to the Penrose triangle, we explored two altogether impossible objects, the so-called devil’s tuning fork and this heavy metal star. When the end times come, remember the lessons you’ve learned here, activate your impossible objects, and follow the prompts. And that’s all, folks. Deke’s Techniques began life as the very first weekly series at lynda.com, and it caught on immediately. As we used to say, lynda.com was the most popular video training library on the planet, Tuesday was the most popular day at lynda.com, and Deke’s Techniques was the most popular thing on Tuesdays. In the years since, I’ve never missed a week, so long as lynda.com, or now LinkedIn Learning, was open. Next week, for the first time, I will. I will also miss the week after that. In fact, I will miss all the weeks. As the song goes, a dragon lives forever, but not so, little boys. I’m the dragon, you got that, right? As for the little boys, well, they’re not just boys, and eventually, they all grew up. And that’s okay. Things change. It just means that after 1,000 years, as per the rules laid down by Puff, the Magic Dragon, I will now cease my fearless roar. That doesn’t mean I won’t ever bring it back, but for now, I’m taking a break. In the meantime, I hope that you’ll treat this episode as a kind of index. An index comes at the end, after all. And yet, it serves as another beginning, a table of contents for all that came before. And another great way to sift through Deke’s Techniques is to visit my site, deke.com, which contains illustrations and details for nearly every episode. I continue to own all the assets as well as the detailed step-by-step instructions. Do I intend to auction these assets as an NFT? What? Again, you can learn more at deke.com. And don’t forget, there are and will remain 999 other episodes right here at your fingertips. And so for the last time this time, go back and keep watching.