Fireworks 8 tutorial on hand drawn styles / designs

As you all must have noticed, New trend around is "HAND DRAWN STYLES". Hand drawn designs for web pages is extremely easy to create and absolutely cool to view. This tutorial will help you create hand drawn designs in fireworks using layer blending modes and object grayscale channel.

To begin with, you will need to get a design sketch image. You can either draw using illustrator / freehand or sketch on a piece of paper and scan it. I find putting my design on a piece of paper and scanning it "the easiest and fast". The snapshot of my sketch is shown below.

1.Import your design image on to your fireworks canvas.

2. In layer's blending mode, select "Multiple".

3. To "invert" your image, either press - "Ctrl+Alt+Shift+I" or from menu bar, "Filters > Adjust colors > invert"

4. Now your image will look like the one shown below

5. Change your canvas color to anything other than black or white.
With your image selected, from layers blending mode, select "screen".

6. You might not always need your sketch in white, you might need them in different solid / gradient color shades. To create this, draw a vector square in the color you desire and place it behind your sketch.

7. Select both (vector square and sketch image) and group as mask. To do this, "Modify > Mask > Group as Mask"

Imajine header was designed based on this concept.

Tags: Fireworks hand drawn styles, Fireworks hand drawn designs