Board Design Challenge

I have always loved the game of backgammon and have seen many beautiful and sumptuous boards over the years made from an incredible variety of materials and in many decorative styles.

The other day I was searching for a backgammon board image on the web and had the idea of designing one in Photoshop, offering as it does wonderful opportunities for texturing and creative use of filters

I collected a few images from round the Web to show the layout:

This one shows the layout of the board and pieces in most detail

And this one is a needlepoint design by Carol Beck

Then I set about designing my own, here's what I came up with:

First I made a template in clear colours:

And used the magic wand to select areas to create the layers to work on.

I stuck with the last one and here it is in perspective:

*Ding*, an idea for a Photoshop Challenge I thought, so here it is!

The challenge is simply to design a Backgammon board using Photoshop and any other graphics tools you wish.

It can be simply the board or you may wish to include other elements such as counters, dice, doubling die, shaker cup or recesses for pieces.

You can either start from scratch, or start from this template I made:

(Right click on it and choose Save Picture As)

Then simply work into the basic layout in your own style, there's lots of scope here!

The finished size is important for the resulting slideshow to work, and must be the same as this template, 550x430 pixels at a resolution of 72ppi.

Try to keep the filesize down to something between 30 and 70K depending on detail, and save as .jpg files.

Please send both your design and a perspective view as you see in my pair of examples above.

Please email your two images to me at:

tlady@clara.co.uk

by Sunday 25 August, 2002

To see our previous challenge slideshows, click here

If you are not already a member of the Photoshopetc Group and would like to take part, click here to join

Have fun!

Lin