2012 Wallpaper - G is for Gameplan - Michigan State

Submitted by monuMental on

Last year Michigan State punched Michigan in the mouth. They literally punched them in the mouth. After being called for 13 penalties (6 of them of the 15 yard variety) Michigan State Defensive Coordinator Pat Narduzzi famously said, "That's what we try to do. Sixty minutes of unnecessary roughness. I'm just happy it didn't get called on every snap."

State has clearly been the more physical team of late and their boundary pushing gameplans have paid off to the tune of four straight wins in the rivalry. This wallpaper was inspired by their bold and reckless tactics. I picture the Michigan State coaching staff handing out stacks of flash cards like those used to teach sight words to kindergarteners. Yes, this is a dig at the level of intelligence required to gain acceptance to the state university. Yes, I attended a state university (not that state university) so I am licensed to dig.

The images below are previews only. You can get the widescreen, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.

 

G is for Gameplan - 2012 Game 7 Wallpaper Preview

 

G is for Gameplan - 2012 Game 7 Wallpaper Preview

Comments

codeBLUE11

October 17th, 2012 at 10:56 AM ^

Love it. Wallpapered so that my Michigan State cubemate has to look at it all week.

Only problem is that if you've ground down a pencil that much, there's bound to be some eraser wear!

monuMental

October 17th, 2012 at 12:55 PM ^

Good point about the eraser. Here are a few candidates for the justification I will use to soothe my obsession with getting the details right and therefore excuse myself from posting a revision. Pick the justification you like best, or recommend one of your own:

  1. The pencil owner is not intelligent enough to recognize mistakes and therefore never erases anything.
  2. The pencil owner only uses the pencil for mindless scribbling.
  3. The pencil owner is a serial sharpener. There was always that kid in elementary school who didn't really need to sharpen his pencil but just liked the grinding sound from the manual pencil sharpener bolted to the wall.

codeBLUE11

October 17th, 2012 at 1:17 PM ^

Haha, seeing as how the pencil owner has clearly gone a substantial amount of time without realizing his pencil says GO STAEE! , I'm pretty sure that it is someone that posseses all three of these characteristics, aka a typical sparty football player.

Anyways, great work as always, monuMental, can't wait to see the big reveal of your special 'project'!

Hardware Sushi

October 17th, 2012 at 5:54 PM ^

I put both the Alabama and Notre Dame mobile backgrounds on my phone; I don't need to tell you guys what happened.

I'm not going to use it until we win on Saturday. Until then, it's just a loaded page in my browser.

ppToilet

October 17th, 2012 at 6:11 PM ^

As always are amazing. So did you create the images and overlay a texture with transparency on the cards? Or did you create textured cards and then overlay the images, adding transparency? Or just apply the same texture to the printing on the cards? And how did you make the metallic part of the pencil - that is just incredible.

You make very difficult things look easy...

monuMental

October 17th, 2012 at 8:51 PM ^

Thanks for the nice words.



I'm not sure how familiar you are with Photoshop (so some of these terms might sound like gibberish) but here are some step-by-step images with descriptions showing how the layers are set up for each card. Build order is from bottom to top layer.

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1. Vintage paper photograph.

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2. Vector Mask for the outer shape; layer styles for the outer glow, drop shadow and top/left edge highlight; Levels Adjustment layer to tweak brightness & contrast.

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3. Distressed paper texture with Color Burn blending mode and Layer Mask with different areas painted in for each card with the airbrush.

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4. Optional water damage photograph with Normal blending mode Layer Mask with the corner painted in with the airbrush.

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5. Illustration with Multiply bending mode (except the white chinstrap which is set to the Soft Light blending mode).

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6. Distressed paper texture desaturated, inverted, set to Screen blending mode and clipped to the illustration shape with a Vector Mask.

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7. Illustration Layer Group duplicated to make colors a bit deeper.

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8. Steps 4-6 repeated for the text.