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A Guide To Making Sigs (& Easy $$$)
#1

Hello, my name is JSS. I have been making sigs for little under the past year and a half. By no means, am I anywhere near close to good or one of the best on this site, but I think I can hold it down and am somewhat qualified to give some sort of advice. With the new rookies coming in, I thought this would be a great time to make this article. I will be splitting this into 3 parts. Why you should be making sigs, grasping photoshop and tutorials. Let's begin.

Part I: Why Sigs?
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Making sigs is far more enjoyable than writing media pieces. In my rookie season in this league, I worked hard writing shitty media pieces that I didn't even enjoy myself to barely afford equipment. I'm not a great writer at all so it usually took me an hour or two to finish a media piece that usually endend up being around 1000 words. I was trying to bust one out every week and by the time I was drafted into the SHL, my bank account was barely in the double digits if I remember correctly and that just off of writing articles. I hated it and there was no way I could of kept this up each season if I wanted to become a top TPE earner. So I looked towards making sigs. I had taken a class a couple years ago that taught me the very basics of photoshop so that no doubt helped a lot, but don't worry if you've never opened up the program and the very few glimpses of it has confused you. There is hope.

Anyways, past that. Making sigs takes far less time writing media if you're not a

talented writer like me. I would say you can easily make something that will land you a 3/5 in a good 30 minutes or even less following some tutorials that I'll be linking down below in part 3. 3/5 times 4 which is the max amount of sigs you can submit each week gives you 3 million SHL buckaroos for about 2 hours of work that is very enjoyable to do once you get the hang of it. Even if you don't get a 3/5 and you earn a 2/5 (you likely won't ever get a 1/5 so I wouldn't worry about that) you still end up with 2 million dollars which is fairly good.

Not only that, I have met very little people who have gotten burnt out on graphics and felt force to them. I can't speak for other GMs, but when I see a new rookie making graphics it's usually a very good sign that that player will have a long lasting career with a fat bank account and I will lean towards a graphics making rookie in drafts more than I lean towards a media writing one. If you look around at who has the fatest bank accounts in the league. Some of the top names include graphic makers like Wasty, Karey, Julio Tokolosh, Jess. That's, because graphics is far more enjoyable than writing media so it doesn't feel like work when pumping them out.

Part 2: Learning Photoshop
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Photoshop can be confusing as fuck when first starting them out, I was very confused when first starting however during my photoshop class all my teacher said to us was watch youtube videos if we want to learn because he was a very lazy teacher, but that's besides the point. I started watching a lot of tutorials on youtube and I learnt a lot very quickly. I'm going to link down below some channels and a video that might help you when first opening up photoshop.



There are also many great youtube channels that can guide you through learning the basics like...

Tutvid
PHLearn
SesoHQ

Even the Adobe website has some great tutorials. Not everything you need to make a decent looking sig is found on these channels, so don't around watching every video you see on these channels however just learning the basics will help for now. As time goes on you, can start looking at the harder tutorials that can help make your sigs look unique from others.

Now to even follow along with these tutorials you have to first obviously download photoshop. I'm not going to link anything, because I don't want to be responsible for anyone getting viruses however it's not that hard to find some on youtube, reddit or even just asking some people in your team discords.

Part 3: Sigs Tutorials
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Now, once you have learned the basics of photoshop I would come here where I will now link a bunch of guides, videos and stuff like that mainly focuses on sig tutorials. Once you have a graspe of how to use photoshop this part becomes really easy and making passable sigs that will increase your bank account is like a walk in the park. Here are some tutorials below.







These are in no way amazing A+ quality sigs that will get you 5/5 however there is what you want in 3/5 sig in all of these sigs. Just follow along to what they're doing for the first couple of signatures you make and as you progress you'll start to develop your own style and get the hang of making signatures without using the videos. Once you end there is when you truly can elevate your style. These type of videos really helped me out when I first started out making signatures and you can really notice the difference in my sig that I made before finding these types of videos and the one I made right after finding these types of videos as you can see in the image below. Left is before, right is after.

[Image: EliasSHL.png] [Image: ODowdSHL2.png]

There is also the resources section of the graphics subforum where you can find loads of other helpful signatures and PSDs made by members of this site.


To end of this article, once you get the hang of photoshop and after a couple of signature attempts with the videos I link in part 3, you really get the hang of making sigs and it becomes really easy. I strongly encourage any new member or even current member to try out photoshop and making signatures as it's an easier money making resource which will help you develop a better player as money is very important in the SHL. You won't get good overnight doing this but with tons of practice and lots of signatures you'll become a sig god in no time. Just look at some of the first signatures made by @Wasty @ToeDragon84 @dankoa and some other top tier sig makers on the site and look at their current signatures. One last thing before ending this off for good, even if your sigs are complete garbage in your opinon you should still 100% post them to the site for critque and advice as well as money. Nobody cares about how your signature looks if you're looking for some advice. Anways, thanks for reading.



[Image: 3.png]

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#2
(This post was last modified: 08-01-2019, 10:36 PM by Lazyeye.)

JSS,

Great thread. I’m gonna pin this shit for all our users, especially people looking to get into sig making. Definitely one of the best contributions to the graphics section in quite some time

A note on tutorials: you can find some good ones on deviant as well. Usually called tags nowadays so just search tag tutorial and you’ll get quite a few hits

[Image: I3BTEQc.png][Image: dGD5tIx.png]
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