Tutorials
In today’s Adobe Illustrator video tutorial we’re going to have some fun creating a retro mascot character design of a hot dog, using inspiration from the classic cartoon style of the 1930s known as “rubber hose”. Imagine the early Disney or Fleischer Studios characters with their bendy limbs, pie-shaded eyes and three-fingered hands in white gloves. We’ll use a combination of the brush and blob tools to construct the illustration from scratch, then incorporate a limited colour palette and subtle texturing to suit the retro look. I’ll show you some of my favourite illustrating techniques and brush settings to help you draw your own fun character designs.
Resizing an image sounds like one of the simplest things you could do in Photoshop, but there are actually some common mistakes you should avoid. In today’s digital age, you will probably want to resize an image so it fits nicely on a computer screen, however, if you’re a professional designer or photographer, it becomes a little more complicated when you need to factor in print size and resolution. In today’s guide I’ll cover the basics of resizing an image in Adobe Photoshop, and explain when you should (or should not) choose the Resample option.
Recently I was wandering around the stalls at a classic car show admiring a collection of vintage automotive signs, which featured various lubricant and fluid brands on old rusty metal plates. It has taken over 70s years to slowly decay those tin advertisements into vintage memorabilia, but they gave me the idea to use the aesthetic to create our own rusty sign effect using Illustrator and Photoshop. Follow along with today’s tutorial to produce a simple motor oil brand sign with a 50s inspired design, using type and colours that are based on authentic examples. We’ll use Illustrator to construct the design for its powerful shape and text editing tools, then we’ll transfer the artwork over to Photoshop to distress it using a rusty metal texture. I’ll show you how a simple layer mask trick can instantly take your crisp digital design and give it a realistic weathered patina look.
The style of ‘Old School’ tattoos is a popular aesthetic in the tattooing scene and has become an iconic illustration style in other genres of art. The stylised handmade drawings feature thick black outlines and bold colours, often depicting roses, anchors and pin-up girls from the tradition of sailor tattooing. Follow along with today’s Photoshop tutorial to produce a digital illustration inspired by the style of old school tattoos. Unlike tattooing with ink, Photoshop layers to make it easy to draw with the advantage of being able to delete and try again! We’ll then bring the design to life with colour, and apply a stippled shading effect to create a modern interpretation of a traditional tattoo flash graphic.
In today’s Adobe Illustrator tutorial we’re going to create a striped text effect with a retro 70s vibe. We’ll create the effect by layering up a series of strokes and fills with Illustrator’s Appearance panel, which preserves the live text so you don’t lose the ability to edit the wording. Once the artwork is complete, I’ll then show you how you can achieve an old t-shirt look with the help of my free washed and worn textures.
Follow along with today’s how-to guide to create a letterpress style poster design with overprint effects. Authentic poster art of this kind would traditionally be created by hand on a letterpress print machine, where the transfer of ink from roller to paper would naturally create the texturing and overprint appearance. Instead, we’ll be using Adobe Photoshop to mimic the style of vintage prints by using digital fonts, textures and Photoshop effects. Along the way, we’ll go over some useful techniques for creating type layouts, producing effects that realistically replicate the appearance of printed ink, and I’ll show you how layer masks can be used to apply textures that make your clean digital art look like an authentic hand-made print.
