Transcripts
1. Introduction & Overview: Glitch is a really cool experimental technique of using deliberately induced errors and distortions for creative purposes. It is often used in graphic design, fine art, and photography to create something unexpected and to go beyond creative limits. There are different ways Glitch art can be created, and in this class, I will be sharing my favorite Glitch technique using a scanner. This is Evgeniya Creative and I would like you to join me in this class to experiment and create striking and unpredictable images. In this class, I will show you how you can create a range of different glitch affects, what you can glitch, what to keep in mind when setting up and using your scanner, how to clean your scans in Photoshop, and share a few ideas on how you can take your Glitch art further. This class is suitable for any skill level and all you will need is a scanner and some stuff to scan. I cannot wait to see your Glitch art. Enroll now, and let's make something awesome.
2. What to Glitch: To make glitch chart, you can use any type of file that's colored. It doesn't need to be super expensive and it doesn't need to be very high resolution either. Here, I've got the standard only one Epson printer and I bet most of you have something similar at home. You can glitch any type of images. It can be illustrations, photographs, paintings, printouts, drawings, whatever you can think of and get your hands on. Why would you glitch them? Well, you can do it just for fun, to add an extra level of complexity, or to produce distortions which create a new or different narratives. Or your glitch experiments can help you to develop your visual ideas and look at your work from a new and unexpected angle. For example, a glitch photograph can be an artwork with a new meaning in its own right. Or it could be a great starting point or a reference for a severe illustration. Remember Dali's painting, the persistence of memory, it's just glitched too. Nobody stops you from making something like that. Glitch shapes can build a starting points for illustrations, to build characters upon or is abstracts or varied backgrounds to draw attention to the design. Anyway, these simple geometric shapes look awesome. As a graphic designer, I'm mad about glitch typography. Glitching type allows you to take something quite rigid, perfect and mechanical and bring some playfulness and imperfection to it, which makes it more relatable and lively. You can push your type far to the point of being just abstract unreadable shapes or you can add a new character to it by slightly distorting it, but still keeping it as recognizable texts. You can glitch your own typographic compositions, words or individual letters, or any existing type from books, newspapers, magazines, posters or any ephemera such as paper bags, tickets and so on. Glitching objects is a totally amazing approach which brings tones of creative possibilities. By objects, I mean, well, any physical objects, such as the stone, any materials, such as fabric replace old, plants and flowers, any surfaces with school textures and so on. Probably, most of you played around this on your face or your hands at some point in your life. Your body could also be a cool thing to glitch and you can create some alien like shapes like that and produce some preaches real distortions. If you choose to glitch your face, be aware of the bright lifetime is from the scanner. Generally, when glitching or just scanning, don't lean on the scanner bed because you might break it and hurt yourself. Well as you can see there's a lot of stuff you can glitch. So look around and collect some staff to scan. Also, make sure to check out our glitcher board on Pinterest to get some ideas and illustration. When you've got a few things to glitch, go on to setup your scanner.
3. Setting up Your Scanner: Before we jump into glitching, there are few things you need to set up and consider. Depending on what you want to glitch and how, you will need to play around with the scanners settings. There can be different ways to set your scanner up, depending on the make of the scanner and the operating system of your computer. As you can see, I've got Mac OS X, and I am going to quickly show you how to set up the scanner using standard software available in the System Preferences. All we need can be found right here in the Printers and Scanners settings. Let's open Scanner and have a look at the settings. So there are a few things here, but most of it, we don't need anyway. The first thing to set up is the image kind. For the best result, it's good to select Color regardless of what you are actually scanning. Next pick your file format. You can choose whatever you want, depending on what you want to do with your image, and how would you want the quality to be. So for maximum quality, choose uncompressed TIFF format, and for anything else you can stick to JPEG. Remember the TIFFs are going to be huge, so try not to run out of memory on your computer if you'd go wild with a number of experimental scans. Then we need to set up the resolution. This is the most important variable for producing cool glitch art. Resolution affects the speed of the scanner head, so the higher is the resolution, the slower the scanner head will move. Since glitch is achieved by moving stuff around while scanning, this can help you to achieve the desired effect. 300 dpi is fast, but probably manageable for fast movement, and about 600 dpi is good if you want it to be slow and controllable. Of course the resolution will also affect the size your image will be. So if you're planning to use it for large format applications, you might want to turn the resolution up and deal with a really slow speed of the head. Here you can also quickly specify where you want your scans to be saved and give them custom names. All other settings, you can set to None or Off make the scanning process faster. But you might want to bring some of them back, for example, dust removal if you notice too much dust coming through. In any case, the best results come from practice and experimentation, and you'll probably need to try out a few different settings before you get comfortable with your glitching. Apart from the scanner setup, you need to consider your environment because you will be scanning with the scanner open. If you have too much backlight, it can make everything overexposed while scanning, and you will lose details on the images. So scanning in a room with direct sunlight or a very bright light is not a great idea. In the darkened room, your backgrounds will be dark black, but you'll also possibly see more dust in the background because of how the light holds. Keep all of this in mind, and let's move on and look into movements for different cool glitch effects.
4. Glitch Movements: Unlike other more pure bleach approaches of where the result is random and left to chance, scanner glitch allows you sort the levels of control over the way you final image will look. There are a few different movements you can make, and I am going to quickly outline them to help you to get started and see how easy it is to make something awesome. Sliding alone with a scanner head, allows to prolong certain parts of the source and make some nice and simple distortions as long as you scan some parts of the source without moving them. It is also a good exercise to get started and to get used to the speed of the scanner head. Now it's a good time to check out different resolutions and understand what speed works best for you. I will stick to 600 DPI for now because it allows me to smoothly move my source along and follow this count head quite precisely. If you're scanning a print or an illustration and can see through the image on the reverse, you can use it to your advantage and move it along the scan head to achieve the effect you want. When sliding, you can also incorporate some smooth movement sideways to create wave distortions or you can slide it sideways on an angle. The way you place your source in relation to the scan head obviously will determine which way you will prolong it. It can be vertical, horizontal, or on any other angle. You can also slide backwards instead of sliding along. This will squash the parts which you move backwards. You can also experiment with shifting the source of this fast movements. Faster scanning speed can also help, so I'll change my resolution to 300 dpi and try it out. Here. You can also experiment with different directions of movement. Turning the source while scanning can also produce some nice simple distortions. Now, I've changed the resolution back to 600 DPI and try it out. This looks quite good. You can repeat fragments of the source a number of times. Just let it scan as much as you want and then quickly shift the source forward so it can scan the same part again. This can make some really, really awesome visuals. Also, you can repeat by flipping. Again, let it scan like that a bit unmoved, and then really quickly iterate 180 degrees. Or you can experiment with other angles as well for other effects. If you have a scanner which captures more than just what touches the glass and focus, then you can also experiment with lifting your source to play with it scale. My scanner will just make everything blurry when I lift it up, but it still can be used as an effect. It's always a good idea to create a number of glitch versions of the same thing and to scan an unglitched source too. It's not just for the sake of development and experimentation, but to allow yourself a possibility to combine a few scans into one final image in Photoshop, or even to put together a simple gift glitch animation. These are a few ways you can glitch using a scanner. Of course you can mix them together anyway, you want an improvise. It's a really fun and rewarding process for making tons of cool integrated images, so go wild and have fun. After you're done with glitching, you might want to reattach your work in Photoshop, and this is what the next tutor is about.
5. Retouching Scanned Images: Before you start retouching your glitch scans in Photoshop, it's a good idea to have a look at everything you have scanned, and make sure every file is named in an understandable manner. Also, now you can pick your favorite versions, and delete anything you don't need or like. Then let's open the first scan you want to retouch in Photoshop. When you've opened it, I advise you to resave this file as a PSD and leave the original scan unchanged, in case you need to go back to it. Now, let's have a look at what we can do to make it look more finished. The first thing to decide on, probably is the size, format, and composition. Select "The Crop Tool" from the tools panel, and set the size you want your final image to be by selecting, "Width-Height Resolution" in this drop-down menu. Then type your desired settings here. Check delete cropped pixels if you are totally sure about your cropping, or keep it unchecked if you want to reposition your image filler within the new format later on. Click "Enter" to crop your image. If you've scanned some print or illustration, you'll probably have some weird stuff shown on the edges of your scan. To get rid of it really quickly, you can use a Spot Healing Brush Tool. Choose it on the tools panel, then set it up on the top panel here. Choose the size and hardness you want to use. For this kind of stuff, I like to set hardness to somewhere between 80 and 100 percent, but check out what works best. Then go around and paint on the areas you want to be healed. You might need to do it a few times to get it right. This is a quick way of cloning things, and if it doesn't work for you, you can choose one of the manual cloning tools such as healing brush or clone stamp. With both these tools, you need to specify the source area which you want to clone from by old clicking. Then paint in the area which you need to cover. If you have found an object and have a more uneven background, I would advise you to go along with it and not worry too much about your touch on it, at least for now. If you have uneven white background like I've got here, you can quickly make it solid white by using Levels Adjustment. Go to Menu, Image, Adjustments Levels or press "Command L" or "Control L" in Windows. In the Levels Window, choose white eye dropper tool, and click on the areas on the image, which you are supposed to be white to set the white point. You might want to zoom in to see what you were selecting, and click around to get rid of all defects. To check how the quality and see whether you've missed anything, you can hold down the Alt key. When you are done with white, select "Black Eye Dropper" and select "Black Points" to bring in more contrast. Yeah, this looks good to me. Now, you can really quickly adjust the color. It's got to be done with a non-destructive adjustment layers. So open the Adjustments Panel, if you cannot see it, go to Menu, Window, Adjustments. Here, you can use any tool you like to tweak the colors. I'm not going to go into the stuff at the moment, you probably know these tools. If not, play around with them and check out my previous classes in source and mixed series, to learn about adjustment layers and color adjustments in Photoshop. Now, you're pretty much ready for posting. Save your work as JPEG and RGB color mode and post away. Actually, hang on, I've got a few suggestions for you about how you can push this glitch stop further.
6. Ideas for Further Use & Conclusion: As nice as our glitch experiments already are in their pure form, I want to quickly give you a few hints about how you can use and develop them further. You can create a pretty awesome effect if you lay a number of different glitched variance and combine them with unglitched original. For this, you can simply put all of them into one file in Photoshop and play around with the blending mode and colorizing layers differently. Also, you can create really cool visuals by putting them together using channels. Using this technique, you can make something like this or like this. I got a separate class which extensively covers using color channels and Photoshop for creative purposes, so, don't hesitate to check it out and experiment. It is actually a very simple and call to cake. You can also have some fun and put different glitch versions and their original into a simple gif animation. This approach could really lead to some cool stuff and the outcomes would look great on your Instagram. You can use your glitched images as backgrounds and set the unglitched type on top. This is really awesome for posters and stuff like that or you can use your glitched images as a basis for development layout, which can produce pretty lively designs. This is a different story on its own, and if you would like a separate class on that, please give us a shout. Well, these are just a few tips, and you can do whatever you want really from keeping glitched images as they are, to using them in some complex stuff. Just have fun. So that's probably it for this class. I hope you've enjoyed it and learned something new. Now, go ahead and experiment. If you like this class, please leave a review so more people could discover it. I cannot wait to see your glitch experiments and hear about your experience. Make sure to post your work in the project section for this class and if you are going to share your work on Instagram, please tag #AttitudeSkills so that we can see it there too. If you have any sort of questions, leave a comment on the community board for this class and I will happily answer and provide feedback. Thank you for enrolling in this class and I hope to see you in our other classes.
Evgeniya & Dominic Righini-Brand, Graphic Design & Photography
