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!

And thanks again!

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.

1680×1050

Click here for the green version
Click here for the pink version
Click here for the blue version

Hope you like ‘em!

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!

And with that said and done, you can:

DOWNLOAD THE BLOOD SPLATTER BRUSH PACK HERE.
(right click and ’save target as’).

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.

Coincidentally, this is also the band that Dave from Boy in a Band, Kieran from Guy With a Guitar and Jamie from Boy With a Bass are in. Funny how things work out, huh?

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!

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.

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.

 Resolution

Working in the wrong resolution can be disastrous in terms of your final outcome, as well. What your design will be printed on plays a key role in helping you decide upon the right resolution. Most printers print at 300 dpi (which stands for dots per inch in terms of the translation from pixels to dots on a page). When in doubt, just make sure you work big – you can always scale down later if need be.

Rich black

Maybe your design involces a lot of black? Well in CMYK, you would assume that to produce a true black, it would be K=100, right? Wrong. Using this value will result in a dark grey, but not a rich black, which is what you’d be aiming for in order to get the best results. You’re better off using:

C=90 M=60 Y=30 K=100

This will mean that all colours in the gamut are used to some extent, and mixed to create a more… ‘black’ black. However, be warned, using rich black on smaller text or features will render them indistinguishable, so don’t fall into that trap!

Now you shouldn’t be making any of the basic mistakes during you’re creative process. Hope this helps!

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:

DOWNLOADING THE CREEPY BRUSH SET HERE.

(right click and ’save target as’).

Don’t know how to install brushes in Photoshop? Keep reading to find out…

Download the brushes then extract the *.abr files and place them into:

Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop X\Presets\Brushes (where X is the version number for your version of Photoshop).

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…

.fla : This is the extension for a source file which can only be opened/read by Flash. This is how an animation/game/etc will be saved until you are finished and ready to publish it.

.swf : This is the extension of the file that is created after you publish your finished work so that it can be embedded on the web and viewed by other applications.

Action Script: Flash’s unique programming language

Frame rate: FPS (or ‘frames per second’) is the rate at which your animation plays. Flash’s standard FPS is set to 12. The faster you’re frame rate is, the more fluid and smooth your animation will appear, however, too fast a frame rate will have the opposite of the desired effect.

Frames: The time line is made of these, and the order in which they are arranged in Flash will be the order in which they will be displayed in your animation.

Keyframe: A keyframe is a frame in which you change something in your animation. Motion tweens automatically fill in the frames between key frames to produce a fluid result.

Layers: These help you organise all the art in your animation and work much the same as layers do in any other graphics program. It’s best to think of them as transparent sheets set on top of each other.

Library: This is where imported files (such as sound files, video clips), movie clips and other symbols are stored within your Flash document.

Stage: This is effectively your canvas, and where you are going to place all your graphical content. Size and background colour canbe changed using the ‘Property inspector’ button.

Symbols: A graphic, movie clip or button that you can create which will automatically be added to your library. This allows you to reuse it throughout your document.

Timeline: Located at the very top, the timeline enables you to control your documents content by use of frames.

Tweening: Tweened animation often runs a lot smoother, and is an easy way to produce changes over a set period of time, whilst reducing the file size, as well because Flash only stores the values for the keyframes for this process. You are able to define size, rotation and position using tweening. There are two types: shape, and motion tweening. Shape tweening obviously deals with morphing the shape of an object over a set time period, and motion tweening, with the movement of objects.

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.

And finally, you can view the finished piece in full by clicking here.