In today’s video tutorial we’re going to look at creating a photo effect inspired by the loading screens and cover artwork of the Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA) game, which feature a life-like illustration style of the characters but with a clear digitally painted appearance. Due to the nature and theme of the game, the effect works best when combined with pictures of gangsters, fast cars and scantily dressed ladies against the city streets. While the originals were likely painted from scratch, we’ll use stock photos as the source of the effect, which will then be transformed with the help of a cocktail of Photoshop filters.
Wings and winged creatures have appeared in identity designs for centuries as part of heraldic crests, military insignias and automotive logos. They have become a symbol of prestige, strength and speed, with great examples being air force pilot badges and luxury car emblems such as Bentley or Aston Martin. Designers still make use of these symbols in their designs today, sometimes combined with modern art styles give the logo a more abstract appearance. In today’s inspiration showcase I present 45 magnificent winged logo designs, some just featuring outstretched feathered wings while others include full depictions of eagles, hawks and other birds.
Access All Areas have a colourful collection of old school tattoo inspired vector illustrations to download this week, courtesy of Bad Taste. This Love Edition of tattoo elements focuses on hearts, flowers and birds, making the assets perfect for creating stylish Valentine’s Day themed artwork. Each pre-made design is available in AI and EPS format, plus 6 seamless patterns and a total of 33 objects that have been exported as individual SVG and PNG graphics.
The key to creating authentic looking vintage designs is to have a wide range of original resources that date from the era you desire. It can be difficult to find vintage genuine assets, but this bundle has you covered! The Creative’s Ultimate Vintage Collection gives you access to a complete toolbox of rare vintage resources. You’ll find high quality textures, old papers, fonts and illustrations derived from antique source materials. With a $1750 discount reducing the price to just $29 you won’t find better library of vintage tools.
I’ve given away plenty of free Photoshop Actions here on Spoon Graphics, but so far I haven’t shown as much love to Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom is becoming increasingly popular as the go-to photo processing tool. Just like with Photoshop Actions, you can save a series of adjustments as a preset, which can be used to instantly apply cool effects to your images with just a single click. Download this free collection of 12 Cinematic Lightroom Presets to transform your photographs with various contrast and colour alterations. They’re all based on the colour grading aesthetics of popular movie genres, such as Horror, Western, Action, Romantic and more. The visual styles of these films are usually seen on the big screen, but we can replicate similar looks within still images with the help of these preset image adjustments.
To finish off every year I enjoy taking a moment to look back at my content from the past 12 months to compare how all my articles, tutorials, freebies and videos performed in terms of view counts. This is my greatest hits collection for 2018, broken down into individual top 10 roundups for each category. Did you miss any of these most popular posts? Which one from the list was your favourite? Or was there a particular piece of content you found really useful that didn’t make the cut?
