Every day this week, I’ll post a free video that describes how I created a wicked-awesome, Halloween-appropriate, five-by-three-foot pirate flag. (Hey, at least I and my boys love it!) Today’s video, and the four that follow, hail from my upcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced  course for my video publisher lynda.com. But strangely enough, this specific phase of the project happens entirely in Photoshop. This is a bitchin’-rad-real-world piece of graphic art, after all, and nothin’ worth makin’ happens in a single piece of software.

Here’s the official description:

In this exclusive preview of his upcoming Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced, Deke McClelland shares six phases in the creation of an authentic five-by-three-foot pirate flag. In today’s episode, Deke uses Photoshop to adjust, distort, and otherwise refine an ink drawing into a work of compositional perfection. Look for the full course to be released in its entirety later this year.

Topics include:

• Editing artwork and filling in missing details
• Flipping a drawing to reveal its defects
• Reforming artwork with the Liquify command

Note that the live-action intro is unscripted and largely off-the-cuff. A handful of my friends have told me that they like this better than the scripted “heads” and fast-action dekePods of the past. As always, I’m curious to know what you think.

So don’t just sit there. Tell me.