By Jim Docherty

INTRODUCTION: CREATE THE BASE

The Red Stag Award images were created to give a photorealistic impression of a classic award plaque. This does two things for our program: first, it provides the winner with a high quality image that is immediately recognized by visitors as an award; and second, it provides us the long term potential as an actual plaque to be awarded to Sites Of The Year (a future program.)

The award images were created with Photoshop 5.5 and graphic elements from Corel and our family coat-of-arms. Each award is comprised of 10 separate layers and optimized as jpeg files to retain color tones. Here are the steps that were taken to construct the Red Stag Award in Gold...

Most award plaques have a base made of wood and typically rectangular in shape. I chose a background sample from a Corel clipart collection and resized the tile to 100x123 pixels.
The layer was then beveled using a freeware plug-in designed to make buttons. The trick is to keep the bevel large enough to be seen, but small enough to keep the proper perspective and realism.

Continue to Part 2, "Gold Plates" >