Color Mixed Brushes

Brush set for Adobe Illustrator by celithralia . "The colors shown are the base colors for the brushes. You can change the line color at any time to experiment with different color hues. Bolder color choices seem to work best. You can always drag the brush icon out onto the main board and edit the colors, then create a new brush if you want a specific color combination." Download

Business masterclasses for illustrators

The Association of Illustrators (AOI) has announced a business management course aimed at illustrators setting up on their own. The 11-session course starts on September 3; the AOI is offering a discount on the course cost for those who book by July 31.
Through a series of practical workshops, the courses aims to equip illustrators for self-employed life. Workshop themes include self-promotion; bigger markets for profit; copyright, licensing and contracts; pricing your work; persuasion and negotiation; portfolios and agents; money management; keeping abreast of technology; and tax and bookkeeping.
Read more Digital Arts Online

Elastic

by Silvionix

Outlining Strokes

There are different cases when designers need to convert strokes to filled objects. Outlining strokes in a vector logos may prevent print problems with uneducated clients. In Adobe Illustrator strokes are measured in points and usually when you scale an object (up or down) , the stroke weight stays the same but the rest of the artwork gets unproportionally distorted. By outlining the strokes before you hand in the logo file to the client you can be sure that if he desides to scale the logo, the strokes' visual weight will always match the rest of the logo.

Menu command : Object>Path>Outline Stroke

Spacecraft Custom Shapes for Adobe Photoshop

A collection of custom vector spacecraft shapes for Adobe Photoshop by retoucher07030. Those are just outlines but I'm pretty sure someone will find them useful. Note if you're a CS3 user you can export and use the shapes is Illustrator (select + copy in Photoshop and paste in Illustrator) Download link

Scaling and transforming in Adobe Illustrator

Scatter rubbish brushes for Adobe Illustrator

The pack contains 8 scatter brushes:

1 bubbles brush
3 rain brushes for background rain both light and dark, one for visible raindrops
4 night sky brushes for nebulas, for dense groups of small stars, for twinkling stars and for fireflies
Thanks to maddama DownloadNote: The brushes were made for working with mid-to-high resolution images. If the effects come too big you'll have to expand them, select the whole lot and resize it with the transform tool.

Note2: If you want to make your scatter effect more subtle and less expressive, select the curve and lower the opacity value. Window>Transparency

Illustrating Fashion Tutorial

Another great digital art publication from Computer Arts Magazine's website. This tutorial might be of use to beginner digital illustrators and fashion designers...

"Follow Cybèle as she develops a sketch for a spring 2008 accessories collection into a completed fashion illustration. When working on a fashion assignment, it’s important to dress the characters not in what is being worn at the time you create it, but what will be worn when the illustration is published and afterwards. So it’s essential for fashion illustrators to keep up to date with the current and upcoming fashion collections and street trends..."

Click on the images below to see full size screenshots. Download tutorial (pdf)

Lima (vector, photography and brushes)

Photomanipulation by whisperingsmith

Phantasm CS Designer/Studio Adobe Illustrator plug-in review

With such a range of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins on the market, it’s rare to come across one that excels to this extent. Phantasm CS adds Photoshop-style adjustment tools and functionality that seamlessly integrates with Illustrator’s native features, including standard gradients, meshes, filters and effects.
Furthermore, Phantasm CS is fully compatible with Illustrator’s Actions and Live Effects, which can potentially speed up your workflow. Read full review PCAdvisor.co.uk

How to draw vector flowers with Adobe Illustrator

A basic, but eye-opening image tutorial from lord-angelus. While learning how to draw vector flowers, will also have the chance to explore the main usage of: The Rectangle tool, Punker Bloat Transform Effect, Elipse tool, Rotate Tool, Blends, etc...

Feel free to post questions and links of the flower illustrations that your come up with.

Aviary's creative suite

A demo video of a Aviary's new browser based image editor software and a part its review from webware.com
"I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer." Click here to see the full video review.

Sun Vectors

A collection of abstract sun vector shapes thanks to GreenGirl. To use the vectors open the pdf in Adobe Illustrator. Download

Cutie

Vector Illustration by Imit.

Comments on the dirty logo

I'm not a big fan of TV Shows or for that matter TV at all. The logo of FX's television show Dirt, starring Courtney Cox from Friends impressed me though. I researhed feedbacks about the logo around the web and I found pretty interesting comments about it. So here are some post quotations from the forum of a typographic website typophile.com"any thoughts on why the “i” is upside down?"

"exclamation mark"

"To make it something more memorable than plain text.

To create an ’exclamation point’ recalling the sensationalism of tabloid press.

Interestingly, the ’i’ is shifted down, putting the dot below the baseline, perhaps a metaphor for something buried or underground, reinforcing the dirt. I was pondering this already, thanks to heavy advertisement featuring ’Digging in the Dirt’ by Peter Gabriel."

"I could swear this is a play on a British tabloid. Perhaps someone can comfirm. I see it as an exclamation point as well. In the media nothing can be big enough or bold enough. So, of course, they use lots of exclamation points thinking this is another way to emphasize the point."

"The negative eye, looking for the bad stuff, punctuating the dirt—Upside down as in “Down and Dirty” You can check the whole discussion here : http://www.typophile.com/node/30281

Grunge Borders Tutorial

This morning I came across this tutorial in Layersmagazine. It covers the use of clipping masks and brushes in Illustrator and Photoshop. Very useful if you're trying to create an organic grungy frame for your artwork.

"There has been a surge of "grunge" effects lately that have been created using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. So here's one more effect for your arsenal of grunge effects. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create a custom brush and use it to create a really cool border mask in Illustrator, allowing you to apply it to a photo or graphic without affecting the original image. You can then take this mask and use it with any graphic that you want. It's simply a matter of getting used to working in mask mode." Full tutorial

Summer

Some people say summer comes after the last month with the letter "r" in its name (months with R are supposed to be cold January, February...December.)

Well, its May, so... Happy Summer folks, close the browser window and go have some fun. Artwork by darkshadowmagus.