Creating Illuminated Letters

While working on the website for Brahms Bookworks I created some illuminated letters in Photoshop. Here's a tutorial about how I did that. The finished letter can be further detailed by hand with gilding or gold paint after it is printed. But if you create an alphabet this way, the letters can be used over and over again in a hand made book.

Here's a cool trick that's not in the tutorial. After the letter is colored digitally, play with "image/adjustment/hue/saturation"...slide the hue scroll back and forth and see the variations of color you can achieve with a single color scheme.

Here's the tutorial.