Watermark - Blog Posts

@bluechocowitz Thing for the lovely lass in the picture's contest! Featuring TK!Sans from @quantumtale, Nightmare!SANEESSS and my own Undertale persona t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶ ̶t̶o̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶n̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶5̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶s̶

Guys, I made myself a watermark!!! :D

I’m a simple person who likes simple things. And Gnomes are simple. I draw gnomes a lot but rarely color them so here’s a cute little gnome guy tieing himself some acorn garland to decorate his home for the fall.

I might make him available online as a T-shirt or a shocker eventually. What do you think?

And no. I still can’t draw backgrounds. They allude me still.

I also plan to use this boyo as a watermark when I have an art piece I feel good enough that it needs protected.

I like gnomes.

Guess who has a new logo. THIS GUY BITCHES

Pomni wishes you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! : ]

Mista Daredevil gives Queen Iceabelle some flowers :]

Some The Amazing Digital Circus fanart! :P

Lord Tourettes in a sweater!!! :3

Made some Watermarks!

Gonna be using them on my art soon, gonna post something later today, just wanted to show these off.

...that your audience won't hate.

This is a method I started using when NFTs were on the rise - thieves would have to put actual work into getting rid of the mark - and one that I am now grateful for with the arrival of AI. Why? Because anyone who tries to train an AI on my work will end up with random, disruptive color blobs.

I can't say for sure it'll stop theft entirely, but it WILL make your images annoying for databases to incorporate, and add an extra layer of inconvenience for thieves. So as far as I'm concerned, that's a win/win.

I'll be showing the steps in CSP, but it should all be pretty easy to replicate in Photoshop.

Now: let's use the above image as our new signature file. I set mine to be 2500 x 1000 pixels when I'm just starting out.

Note that your text should not have a lot of anti-aliasing, so using a paint brush to start isn't going to work well with this method. Just use the standard G-Pen if you're doing this by hand, or, just use the text tool and whichever font you prefer.

Once that's done, take your magic wand tool, and select all the black. Here are the magic wand settings I'm using to make the selections:

All selected?

Good.

Now, find a brush with a scattering/tone scraping effect. I use one like this.

You can theoretically use any colors you want for this next part, but I'd recommend pastels as they tend to blend better.

Either way, let's add some color to the text.

Once that's finished,

You're going to want to go to Layer Property, and Border Effect

You'll be given an option of choosing color and thickness. Choose black, and go for at least a 5 in thickness. Adjust per your own preferences.

Now create a layer beneath your sig layer, and merge the sig down onto the blank layer.

This effectively 'locks in' the border effect, which is exactly what we want.

Hooray, you've finished your watermark!

Now let's place that bad boy into your finished piece.

You'll get the best mileage out of a mark if you can place it over a spot that isn't black of white, since you'll get better blending options that way. My preference is for Overlay.

From here, I'll adjust the opacity to around 20-25, depending on the image.

If you don't have a spot to use overlay, however, there's a couple other options. For white, there's Linear Burn, which imho doesn't look as good, but it still works in a pinch.

And for lots of black, you have Linear Light

Either way, you're in business!

EDIT since this has escaped my usual circles, and folks aren't as familiar with my personal usage:

An example of one of my own finished pieces, with watermark, so you can see what I mean about 'relatively unobtrusive'-- I try to at least use them as framing devices, or let them work with the image somehow (or, at the very least, not actively against it).

I know it's a bummer for some people to "ruin" their work with watermarks, which is part of the reason I developed this mark in particular. Its disruption is about as minimal as I can make it while still letting it serve its intended purpose.

There's other methods, too, of course! But this is the one I use, and the one I can speak on. Hope it helps some of you!

I made some art of my favorite cookie from Cookie Run Kingdom, Poison Mushroom! I'm really proud of this one too, so I decided to make a watermark out of nowhere. (I hope it looks fine over the art to you)

I really need to start playing CRK again, I haven't played in ages