YouTube has become a pretty stable thing in each of our lives. For more than seventeen (17) years now, it has existed and shall continue to exist for many years to come. There are millions upon millions of people who upload to the platform every single day. We as a family are no exception. Although we don’t upload as often as other people seem able to.
Apart from having my own channel for Cerys Bailey Art (shameless plug – feel free to go and Subscribe, for a sporadic posting schedule), I help out and maintain a handful of other channels. I could write another blog to go into each in a bit more detail, but the main one today is my brother’s gaming channel Jacob Bailey Gaming.
Both our mum and I, have been helping Jacob with his channel since he started it. Recently however, I have taken over with making the thumbnails for his videos. He’s begun trying out making shorts alongside his regular weekly content and it seems to be doing well for him so far.
He uploaded a couple of shorts recently and so I started sorting out some thumbnails for them as soon as I could. We ended up finding out however, that the videos had gone missing and it was virtually impossible to get a thumbnail from them, which is what we usually do if we can’t get a proper photo taken in the right context.
Luckily though, I’m an artist; so I got to work. 🙂
The first one was a short about a glitch in Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA 5) where he flings his character into the air using a car, and ultimately ends up in the ocean.
I ran with this idea and drew water. I’m not great with drawing water so I looked up reference photos online and winged it from there.
I filled out the background to be a dark cyan (more green than blue). In white (on a seperate layer), I made a bunch of circle-like shapes all connected to each other, rounding off all the corners. I duplicated this layer, turned down the opacity and made it darker. I then offset that layer to make it look like the water had some depth. I wanted the water to look like we were looking at it from the top rather than from an angle, so I had to make this layer smaller, placed it into the centre and filled in around the edges.
On a top layer, I filled the entire layer with a turquoise (more blue than green this time). I blended in a line diagonally through the centre, using blue, and then white. I then made this layer more transparent. I added the text I wanted to the top, and then that was it! For the first time doing water in a while, I’m insanely proud of it (The orange section is just a marker for his short videos on the channel).
The next short shows my brother drifting a Lexus RCF in Forza Horizon 5 (FH5). Since it was about driving, I figured that tyre marks in concrete was a good idea. I didn’t want it to look too messy, so I started with the idea that the text I wanted on the thumbnail should be placed first, and I built up the rest of the image around it. I had never worked that way that until now.
I liked how multiple “I’s” looked like tyre marks so I rolled with the idea that the text was a part of the marks I wanted to make.
I couldn’t find a brush that I liked, or that worked the way I wanted it to, so I decided to make the tyre marks from scratch too. Again, I briefly looked through a few quick reference photos to remind myself what they looked like (always helpful).
Using a symmetry tool, I angled it where I wanted the tyre marks to go. I started by making a centre line, then made a diagonal line coming out of that. I then got rid of the symmetry tool after realising that trying to do the entire length of the tyre mark freehand wasn’t going to work.
To rectify this, I duplicated the layer, lined it up, and merged it with the small tyre layer already there. I would then duplicate that layer and do the same. I kept doing this until I had a full tyre mark going right across. I then (for the final time) duplicated the full tyre mark and placed it over the text I already had in place. I erased the parts of the tyre mark that were interfering with the text.
For the concrete background, I used a medium-light grey. Using a speckled brush, I put down a couple of different greys on top of one another to give it texture.
And that was that! I know that they might not seem like particularly difficult things to do, but things that seem simple can often be some of the hardest things to figure out. Water specifically, has always stumped me. Figuring out how to do tyre marks in my style was a happy bonus. Regardless, I hope this very brief description has helped.
Cerys, out!