EPIC SuperHero YouTube Thumbnail

It's not every day that a client says "Let's have some fun" and then ask you to turn him into an all-powerful electrified Demi-God. But hey, I loved the idea and it's been a while since I've created a design with a movie poster feel in Photoshop.

The Client was Steve Abel, Creator and owner of the UK's fastest growing motorcycle accessories companies, A Bike Thing. The companies incredible growth is certainly connected to the it's wildly successful and popular ABT YouTube Channel. I've been the exclusive YouTube thumbnail designer designer for the last 2-years, wow that time has flown.

Steve's a great client to work with and he certainly understands the critical importance of a good thumbnail.

Visually speaking a YouTube thumbnail is the first thing any potential viewer actually sees, when you release a new video. If it doesn't inspire them to click it, then all that work you've put into editing a great video is wasted. Trust me, if they don't click that thumbnail straight away, you've probably lost them and they'll soon be clicking on someone else's link. It's the world we live in today!

So, when Steve came to me with the idea if launching a new product (CHIGEE TR100) with an EPIC superhero Thor style design, I was in!

You can see a before and after preview below, which shows the original and quickly shot image Steve sent me and a glimpse of the finished design. You can see the finished design at the bottom of this article. It's worth clicking and see the details at 100%.

If you'd like to learn a little more about how I created Steve God of Thunder inspired graphic in Photoshop, then read on below:

Before I started I needed some inspiration, and a quick google search of Marvel's Thor character, along with some specific keywords turned up a wealth of blue buzzing electrified 'god of thunder' images and Marvel Studios screen clips. like the ones below.

The next thing I need was a few images of Steve. One of the great aspects to working with Steve, is that I' knew he'd up for it. Hwey, it's not every business you can call and ask them to stand in their workplace and have a member of staff shoot some weirdly posed pictures!

He tell sme that it was tough not to laugh, while he pretended to hold something that 'wasn't there'. bearing in mind that for Steve it was a regular work day and clients were in the shop.

So, if you are wondering how this image of Steve started out, just scroll down.

As you can see, the shot's nothing special (no disrespect Steve), I mean there's no special lighting, if fact there is no lighting other than whatever Steve has in the shop. It was also shot using whatever camera Steve had at hand. The blank wall was the only thing that made turning this image into a superhero graphic a little easier. I was half-tempted to leave the wall fixings in :-).

The next thing I needed was my 'pretend Tesseract' or in this case an image of the CHIGEE TR100, which I found on Steve's website. As with most internet based images the resolution and size of the images are generally pretty small to help speed up download, so I did run the TR100 through several cycles of my favourite AI upscaler. See below.

I then removed a weird jpeg artifacts that popped up and added some luminosity sharpening, before editing out the cable. Well, the Tesseract doesn't have a cable does it?

With my Avengers Assembled, er, sorry I mean my elements assembled the work began.

I started off by creating the dark and ominous blue alien world, which you can see in the background. I knew it need some scale and height in order to create some visual depth for Steve's character. With that done I moved onto turning Steve into the God of Thunder and pooling together the layers, shapes and lighting effect I'd knew I was going to need to build up the design.

The overall image was a total of 107 seperate layers and 13 groups which helped keep things organized. I've learnt that with this type of project keeping organized is critical. It's all too easy to get lost in a sea of layers, when you working with a main subject (Steve and the TR100) plus layers that make up the lighting, effects, background, blend modes, and layers styles that each help create the depth, atmosphere and frama of the final image file. See below.

One of the keys I've learnt is to work with a high resolution image frame, where the bulk of the design work is done and then to output at the required dpi and image size, which for YouTube Thumbs is 1920x1080. Have a look at the detail included in this design at 100% scale.

With the composition set and my elements in place I began layering the static, electricity bolts and creating the light and mood of the design, which goes a long way to creating the epic drama of the final image. I've been doing this a while and I've built a huge library of special images, Photoshop brushes and overlays, that I use to build up composites like this one. It's not often that I get to use my lightning brushes, so this was fun.

The last step was to add some blurring and wind effects to localised parts of the image to create the impression of time and space being whipped up, before adding some well chosen text and adding the Chigee logo.

This was a great project and one that was enjoyable to create. I hope you enjoyed learning a little about y process. Here's the final image below. Thanks for checking out my work.

If you enjoy my work and would like to find out more, or you would like to work with me, drop me an email at simonthomas@2ridetheworld.com

Cheers.