I've seen a lot of people making signatures. Some of them are gorgeous, some of them are plain ugly. There isn't one universal guide on how to make a signature, but there are a few things that you should take note of. These aren't completely mandatory but in general outline stuff that make the signature aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

As far as my background is concerned, I happen to know a thing or two about making sigs (mostly because I've been doing it for a while), but please do not consider this tutorial as an authority but as a few tips that could be useful.

I suppose the first thing we should start on is - what is a signature. Signature, or, as dA calls it signature banner, by my definition is an image made out of other images composed together to create one complex piece of art. That sounds vague enough, so by comparison let's look at music. Music has artists - people that create songs and DJs that make a few songs sound well together. Signature is very much the second one. While getting into making these is quite easy, mastering this takes a lot of time and is very difficult.

In most of the signatures we can distinguish four elements - character, caption (or text), effects and background. All of them need to work together well to make the signature look good.

In this tutorial we're going to talk about stuff that you probably heard about in your art classes - composition, dynamic, colouristic, light-shadow and so on, and apply them to signatures. Sounds easy enough, so let's get started.

As examples I will be using my own signatures from my Music Speedart series, so on every one you can click and find a video (speedart) on how it was made.

Composition, in the very general, is how things are laid out on the signature. Where is the character, where are the effects, where is the caption. I personally use two types of composition - central and halved.

'The Time Wizard' - central composition

As you can see here, the character is sitting in the middle of the signature. All the effects are made in such a way to put all the emphasis on him. Both texts are blended into the effects somewhere and aren't the first thing that catches the eye.

In practice the best tools to enhance central composition are zoom motion blurs and explosion c4ds (example).

'Silent Tears' - halved composition

On the contrary, here you can see an example of halved composition. The signature in general is divided on two parts - character on the left and caption on the right.

In practice, this will be most of the time decided for you, based on what render you pick. In cases when the render has part of it cut out, you will probably decide on the halved composition, while if the render is not cropped, the central composition will look better most of the time.

If you want to enhance the halved composition, use a linear motion blur. Light trail c4ds also look pretty nice when you want to separate one part from the other.

Here's an example of a full render and a cropped render.

Part of the composition is also the colouristic. People sometimes forget about that, so here's one simple sentence that should stay in your mind forever: pick one colour and stick to it. When you create a signature, base it around one colour, sometimes adding additional as a support, but that's it. Also remember about the spectrum and when choosing your colours pick either the ones that are close to one another or are complementaries (at the opposite ends)

Dynamic is, surprisingly, how dynamic your signature is, what feeling it creates. Similarly as with composition there are two types - static and dynamic.

'Escape' - dynamic signature

Here you can see a dynamic signature. First of all, we can tell that the character is moving by some very easy clues - open mouth and moving hair. In general, a dynamic feeling is created by diagonal lines - when something is diagonal we perceive it as it was about to fall or move. In the example above it's very clearly shown even by the added slanted grid and diagonally placed caption.

Dynamic feeling can be enhanced by cold colours, light trail c4d (example) or properly used motion blur.

'The Girl' - static signature

Here we can see an example of a static signature. The feeling is made by the character being still (there are no diagonal lines on her, such as raised arm or moving hair). Static signatures often (not always) use warm colours.

Light-shadow, as the name might suggest, is how the light is created and how the shadow is placed. Understanding it is very important so as not to create over-lighted or over-shadowed signatures.

First of all you need to figure out where the light is coming from. If you can't spot it right off the bat, there are some nifty tools that can help you. For example you can try duplicating your render with 'overlay' blending mode so that you can see the lighted and darkened places better or posterize (reduce colours) the render to only two colours. Remember to remove the effects after you've found out how the light is placed because they will make your render look unnatural.

You can use this information to place your lighting correctly. For lighting in general you can use a few things.

• C4D - you can desaturate and change blending mode of a C4D to Dodge to create some lighting. Nebula, ball and light trail C4Ds look the best with it, but you can also try to create nice effects with explosion and other types of C4D. Remember to erase parts that you don't need.
  
• Flares - you can use ready flares off Google Images or create your own. A good and easy way to do this is to make a circle, blur it with about 50px Gauss and put it on Dodge.
  
• Mask - The easiest way to develop light and shadow is just to create a new layer and brush around it with white and black brushes, then bluring it with high Gauss (around 200-400px) and putting it on Overlay or Smooth lighting.
  
• Grain - In order to expand the signature lighting, at the very end you can copy the visible signature into a new layer, desaturate it, change the mode to Grain merge and adjust the opacity.

Depth and perspective go very close together. Not every signature needs to have depth - this is something entirely dependant on you. Depth can be created with motion blur and perspective manipulation while it can be eliminated with textures and pixel patterns.

'The Journey' - depth

In the example above you can see that the perspective of the background makes the character look like she's closer to the front while everything else is a bit behind. The C4D also adds to the depth, creating sort of a shadow behind her.

'Against The Sun' - lack of depth

Anime and cartoon renders by definition lack depth. Here it wasn't eliminated, there was nothing to add it. As you can see, the signature looks pretty flat, with the background not exposed and the light being over the character. If there was a texture or a pattern added, it would look even more flat.

There are a few things you can add to your signature after its done to make it look better.

One of the most common things is gradient mapping to add a bit of colour or tone the signature. Mapping very often can bring a mediocre signature to looking quite good and vice versa. It is a very simple process and it most of the time is the same. Take one colour and pick two of its complementaries from the other ends of the spectrum. Then map them on the signature, choose a proper blending mode and voilà - you're golden.

'Across The Pond' - full border

At the very end of your signature what you want to add is the border - without it the sig would look unfinished. You can either add a full-on border or these so-called cinema bars. There are various ways on doing this and I won't expand on that because you will discover them by yourself easily.

'Crossing Field' - cinema bars

And that would conclude this tutorial. I hope you learned something useful and the tutorial helps you with making better signatures.

Or alternatively you can just order one. (#ShamelessAdvertising)