Hey guys!
First of all, I really have to thank you all for such positive feedback! I can’t believe I’ve gotten so many comments, and e-mails especially, I really do appreciate it!
Unfortunately, I’ve been far too busy as of late. I got a full time job, and a lot of things have been changing which means I’ve not had as much time to dedicate to this site as I’d like, so I’m just letting you all know, that’s why I’ve been pretty inactive. Sorry!
I promise I’m working on a few more free things, my photography, and some art, as well, though. I’ll post these all as soon as they’re done. I wanna re-design the site at some point, too. But yeah, please bare with me!
So, I admit it, I’m a great big geek when it comes to oldschool video games, and I’d quite like my desktop to show that, so I set about making these – Free Space Invaders Desktop Backgrounds for your own personal use.
You get a choice of 3 colours: green, pink or blue. Shiny, huh?
The only current resolution available is for the 20inch wide screen iMac (1680×1050), but if you’re resolution is different and you’d still like to be able to use this, just let me know in a comment and I’ll see what I can do!
By downloading these wallpapers, you agree not to repost them to any other website or claim them as you’re own work.
Funny story, actually. For a while now I’ve been meaning to make a brush pack like this, (especially with Halloween fast approaching) but never really got round to it.
Well, on Wednesday I unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which way you’d want to look at it) cut my finger – and even though it may be a little concerning that one of my initial thoughts after doing so was that I could probably make some decent brushes from such an incident, they did come out quite well.
And now I feel like I am finally validated in saying that I have ’suffered for my art’, which is always a plus.
They’re nice and textured, so they also work well if you’re just looking to add an overall grungey sort of feel to a piece.
Feel free to use these in whatever project you please, even if it’s commercial! The only thing I ask is that you don’t claim the brushes themselves as your own, and it would be nice (but not essential) if I could see how you’ve used them once you’ve finished – I’m always curious!
So as promised, I’ve been working especially hard on editing the photos from my shoot last week with You And What Army. I’ve finally got around to doing the head shots for their myspace. Halfway done! You can check out Dave’s and Kieran’s already.
Incidentally, here’s a time lapse of how exactly I went about producing Kieran’s head shot from the original photo for your viewing pleasure:
Again, all of the shots were initially taken with a Nikon D40x in manual focus and with a standard lens.
The backgrounds are transparent, too – nifty! It’s still proving a lot of fun to do, though, I relish being able to go crazy with colours and effects, and YAWA are the perfect band to do that with. I’ve still got to finish editing the photos of Jamie and Zak, but these two should give you a good indication of things to come.
Seeing as how I like to think that Graphics Girl can be an online portfolio as much as a place to help people out with their own work, I figured it was about time I filled you guys in on the photo-shoot I recently did for Rock/Rave/Rap band You And What Army.
I had a whole lot of fun with this project, mostly because it’s giving me a chance to abuse overlay and screen layers in Photoshop and create something ridiculously epic and spacey looking. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that you can never have too many retina-burning laser effects.
Here’s the first finished group shot:
(Click it to see it in a higher resolution).
All of the photos were taken with a Nikon D40x SLR and edited (quite obviously) in Photoshop CS3.
Hopefully, I’ll have finished with the rest of the shots soon! It’s been a very busy week for me in terms of creative ventures so I’ve had to neglect the site a bit, for which I apologise. You guys can all look forward to more free resources and photoshop tutorials in the week to come, though!
Since I’ve started making photoshop brushes for everyone lately, I thought it would make sense to do a quick tutorial on how to transform your own images into Photoshop brushes yourself! Because a lot of people don’t actually know how to, and it’s really quite simple. I’m pretty sure this works the same in Photoshop CS and above. Enjoy!
Like I said, if you want to produce a brush from another image like a photograph or something, simply use the pen tool to make a selection of it and copy and paste it into a new document where the background layer is white and it should work just fine.
And seeing as how the top part of the video decided to disappear when I uploaded it to Youtube, just incase it isn’t clear enough:
When you’re ready to make your brush, go to Edit > Define brush preset then select the brush tool, click the ‘brush’ drop down menu at the top and then select your brush from the list. Simple.
Having recently finished a design for Kieran from guywithaguitar.com (which you can see here, if you’re interested), I’ve just gone through all the trials and tribulations that designing for print entails – and believe me, there’s quite a few of them.
So, let’s say you’ve decided to design something for print. But whats the major pitfalls you need to avoid? Well, for starters:
RGB/CMYK
When you open a document to start designing in, you should always check that it’s in CMYK and not RGB. If you’re using Illustrator, by chosing the ‘open new print document’ option, you’ll automatically be set to CMYK. However, if you’re using Photoshop, make sure you’re new document is specifically set to CMYK like so:
What’s the difference?
RBG stands for ‘Red, Blue, Green’ and is basically a colour gamut which bases it’s production of colours on light levels. To put it simply, in RGB, colours are made by mixing different amounts of these (red, blue and green) to theoretically reproduce any colour of light, where a 100% mixture of all 3 results in white.
CMYK stands for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Key (Key being an older term for black) and works similarly to RBG, apart from the fact that it uses those 4 colours as opposed to red, blue and green.
CMYK is the gamut used for printing and by most modern printers. The reason why artists will design in CMYK is because there are some colours that can be produced in the RBG gamut that cannot be accurately reproduced in CMYK. Designing in RGB means that when it comes to print, the colours you originally planned on may come out a lot different than expected, and if you design in CMYK, this can be avoided.
I know it’s a little early for halloween, but that being said, you can never have too many spooky themed/slightly scene brushes! So, with that in mind, I present to you – the good people of the Internet – the first (of hopefully many more to come) Graphics Girl, free use Photoshop brush pack!
The pack contains 4 high resolution brushes: a bat, a skull, a spider, and a knuckle duster (just for good measure).
Feel free to use these in whatever project you please, even if it’s commercial! The only thing I ask is that you don’t claim the brushes themselves as your own, and it would be nice (but not essential) if I could see how you’ve used them once you’ve finished – I’m always curious!
Now that the boring stuff is done with, you can start getting creative by:
If you’ve ever seen an animation or any kind of interactive content on the web (which, if you have internet access, is pretty much a given, let’s be honest), chances are it was made in Flash. Want to get started making your own and just haven’t got a clue where to start? Well, here’s a bunch of things you’ll probably need to know before you even think about beginning…
So, what exactly as Flash? To give it it’s full title, Adobe Flash is the program in which all these things can be made.
The latest version is CS4, which can be used to create, animations, games, and other web applications. Animations can either be produced frame by frame, by using the inbuilt timeline feature, or scripted using Action Script – Flash’s own unique programming language. Users can draw their desired content straight into the program with the brush or pen tool, or import images from file.
Objects can also be animated via ‘tweening’, which is less time consuming than frame by frame.
But as you might expect, there’s a lot of terminology unique to this software that can be bewildering unless you’re in the know. With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the most common ones to help you out…
This is to demonstrate how even a small resolution photograph can be used as a basis from which to create a stylised and eye-catching cartoon style vector portrait in Inkscape (though this kind of technique can be easily executed in programmes like Illustrator or Photoshop, as well):
Here’s two detail shots of the mouth and the eyes for you, too. The video is 10 times the speed of the original recording, and to really achieve that comic book feel for a simple but effective background, you can use the same ‘retro dots’ resource from deviantART that I did, by clicking here.
