Tutorials added on February 17, 2009

Mixing Vector work with Photography is a great way to produce a fun and colorful art style. This approach is used in a variety of projects from club flyers and CD Artwork through to high-end advertising imagery. Expanding on the comprehensive guide to the Pen Tool by Ian Yates, we look at creative ways of implanting the tool. This tutorial should convince those of you lacking the confidence to draw within Photoshop to do so with style.

This is simply but very useful tutorial about how to create text effect like using cabs.

This tutorial is all about creating an illustration using just a few stock images of birds. The composition is quite simple, but with a little inspiration you can create something really nice. I would like to thank Flavius for giving me a hand with this - much appreciated!

Finding the right piece of vector art for your project is never an easy task. Trying to find the right vector for free is an even harder one. Luckily for us, in this digital and open source age, there are quite a few resources floating around the web that make the search a little easier. There is an ever growing number of websites that focus on nothing but free vector graphics. Some of these sites are gold mines, while others aren’t worth visiting. Below is a collection of websites that are definitely worth checking out — sites that have high quality free vector files as well as showcases of other free vector resources.

When it comes to freebie designs, beautiful icons sets are tops. Designers scour for these free treasures more than anything else. You can use icon sets in Web applications, website designs and on your desktop. If well designed, they make a great impression on others. Beautifully designed icons also prove the quality of a designer’s work, so many designers make theirs freely available online, thus giving their work more exposure. In the overview below, we present 50 beautifully designed, free and professional high-quality icons for desktop and Web design. All of them can be freely used for private projects, and some are available for commercial use as well. Regardless, always read the licenses — they may change from time to time.

This time, you will see how to do a proper shading for an cartoon art with some techniques in photoshop. It is very useful for some people learning to shade your art. As each part of cartoon such as will be hair, eyes & clothes will be described in detail. Very good, hope you will enjoy!

Happy Valentines Day! In celebration we thought we’d publish this post on the romantic topic of Candlelight Photography! Have you ever tried to photograph a candle lit scene with your digital camera? The results can be stunning with the warm glow of flickering flames reflecting off your subjects face (can you feel the romance?) but the shooting in such a low light environment make it can make it a challenging situation. Here are a few tips on how to get that perfect candle light portrait!

Now I’m going to show you how to create old style photo effect with interesting accent.

This tutorial is inspired by the work of the Lichfaktor collective. You should really take a look at their pictures, which are pure urban poetry. I basically wanted a simple way to create similar light effects without freezing my bones outside at night. To achieve this we'll use both Illustrator to design the basic shapes and Photoshop to create the lighting effects. Since everything is going to be done with smart objects and layer styles, the final image will be scalable at any size.

Taobot is an internationally acclaimed studio that specializes in interactive and graphic design. They work with clients from all over the world on engaging and emotional experiences. The studio is lead by Danny Franzreb and Holger Grunwald, who both have many years of experience in the field of design.

I love photography... that will never change. I could spend hours and hours looking at some awesome pictures, and thank God for Flickr. There, a person manages to find tons of breathtaking shots... full of passion, agony, insanity... some colorful, some not... there are all the feelings. Here is a brief selection of the picture that took my breath away during a little visit to Flickr. I really hope you enjoy these as much as I did. Cheers!

Design inspiration can come from all kinds of sources. Dirt, stones and rust can be excellent sources of inspiration for textured and grunge-style designs. Many websites are now using textured background images to replicate these items, and these techniques can be used in a variety of ways in graphic design. In this post, we'll look at some photographs and websites for inspiration, tutorials to show some techniques for incorporating these textures into your work, and some Photoshop brushes to make it easier.

Some of the world's most outstanding Photoshop illustrators don't only use Photoshop. Many have also mastered Cinema 4D, allowing them to add stunning 3D shapes and effects to their work. If you feel like you've got some skill with Photoshop, why not challenge yourself by adding a new design weapon to your arsenal? In this post we've collected 40 high quality and free C4D tutorials to help you get started!

Simple Changes is a free Wordpress theme for download. This is my first release of a theme, so I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have to give me.

Photoshop users can save themselves a great deal of time and end up with better results by taking advantage of readily available freebies, such as brushes, patterns and shapes. With the wide variety and (often) high quality of resources available, whatever you need or are looking for is in most cases already available somewhere. The only problem is that the vast quantity of freebies can make it difficult to track down what you need. Hopefully this collection of excellent Photoshop patterns will help. The resources featured here are all available as downloads in PAT format, which can be placed in Photoshop. In addition to this format, there is also a number of quality resources online for creating or using patterns in other formats that can be used by any program, not just Photoshop. As with any type of freebie, always be sure to check the license or requirements set by the creator.

A photoblog is a very specific type of blog. Its focus is photography, and there are typically few words beyond a caption and comments. Photoblogs are easy to set up and maintain, and they make great photo galleries for photographers who are put off by the complexity of HTML coding or installing a CMS such as WordPress. It’s because of this simplicity, not to mention the development of free yet sophisticated tools like Pixelpost, that photoblogging has exploded in popularity over the last few years. Photoblogs.org, for example, lists over 32,000 photoblogs! That’s a lot of photos, and a lot of photographers vying for your attention. Dedicated as ever to making your life easier, we’ve handpicked over 50 brilliant photoblogs for your viewing pleasure. There’s a little of everything, including photojournalism and nature, landscape, street, portrait and travel photography. We’ve also listed some of the best photoblogging solutions, articles and other resources at the bottom of the post.

Create a Vector-Based Zune with Photoshop!

One of the most important aspects of a good vintage style design is the use of authentic looking textures. Since most of you probably don’t have time to browse the local antique shop, and your grandmother’s attic is miles away, we’ve put together a list of some of the best vintage textures we have ever seen. All of these are free, but make sure to read the terms before using.

Over the last few months, we have extensively covered the influence of retro and vintage style on modern Web design. We have looked at recent vintage Web designs, showcased posters and typography and presented vintage tutorials. In fact, we are confident that vintage is still in, and that many designers are experimenting with this style to achieve unusual, creative and (hopefully) effective results. So today, we are pleased to release the Smashing Retro Icon Set, a set of 10 beautiful, high-quality “vintage” icons, created by the talented Russian design agency SoftFacade especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set contains 10 original icons: search, sign-up, calendar, news, RSS, comments, email, ads, home and address.

Animal photography is probably one of the most dangerous types of photography. The outcome totally depends on the skills of photographer and the time when the shot is taken. A photographer who uses good exposure, color and blur settings along with appropriate shutter speed and focusing techniques can produce stunning photographs. Animal photographers have to be prepared and be ready for the unknown. They need to study action and language of animals to know every move. Many animal photographers use camouflage to hide themselves and to give photographs a natural and “natural” look. When shooting in wildness, photographers usually shoot with long telephoto lenses from a distance.