The traditional methods of creating pixel art one pixel at a time no doubt yields the best results, but it’s an extremely time consuming specialist craft. Today I’m going to show you how to cheat and make use of Illustrator’s Object Mosaic feature to create cool 16-bit style pixel art the easy way, allowing you to quickly produce retro style sprite graphics for your designs and artworks.
Beautiful patterns can be easily created by duplicating basic shapes with a simple colour scheme. This tutorial explains the process of creating a trendy chevron background pattern using Illustrator’s vector shape tools. We’ll then take the design over to Photoshop to add some extra polish and really bring the pattern to life with subtle gradients and texture effects.
I recently shared some tips with a subscriber about how to create a nautical star design in Illustrator, which then prompted me to research traditional nautical star and compass rose layouts and construct an ornate design of my own. The process makes use of lots of simple but really useful techniques in Illustrator to build up layers of detail. Follow this step by step guide to create a detailed black and white compass rose illustration with various symmetrical pattern effects.
Often when post-processing a photograph the aim is to carefully fine tune the levels and colour balance to capture the real life scene, but sometimes it’s worth taking the edits a little further to enhance an image with hyper realistic effects. Applying colour casts, increasing the contrast and adding lighting effects can give an image an intense mood just like we see in magazines or on billboards.
I’ve received a few questions recently about how I create the letterpress style texturing that appears on pretty much every retro/vintage design I make. Today’s tutorial will show you a quick and easy way to give your logos and typography that ink stamp style effect that originated from the old letterpress style printing technique.
Illustrating with basic linework not only results in some really cool artwork, it also makes the job a lot easier! Instead of painstakingly drawing every detail, simplifying the object into its basic form and using just a single stroke weight produces a stylised pictogram effect. In this tutorial I’ll take you through the process of using this basic linework technique to create a cool motorcycle illustration.