Tutorials
If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know I love creating artwork in Illustrator using simple or basic shapes. This tutorial takes that idea to the extreme by using nothing by the rectangle tool to create a simple 8-bit style pixel character. Pixels are usually associated with Photoshop, but the great thing about Illustrator is your artwork is 100% vector, so unlike Photoshop you can scale your design to any size while retaining those blocky 8-bit characteristics.
We’re probably all familiar with the classic techniques of photographic toning from seeing various examples of Sepia toned images, but for years analog photographers have been experimenting with chemical toners to create various processing effects. One such technique is to split tone a print to create a dark blue and copper coloured image with a dark dejected mood. In this tutorial we’ll look at using Photoshop to replicate this classic technique in digital form, using Color Balance adjustments to achieve the same range of blue and yellow tones.
If you’ve been a reader of my blog you’ll know I love a good badge or emblem style logo design. I’ve done a couple of tutorials before and featured plenty of great examples in showcases. Today I fancied creating another logo of my own, so I used the IGN Alliance network my @spoonergaming alter-ego is a part of to create a military style emblem. Follow this step by step Illustrator to see how the whole thing was put together, using various tools to create the range of vector shapes.
Today’s Illustrator tutorial is perfect for beginners. You don’t need to be a master illustrator to create cool artwork, just using simple shapes and limiting yourself with a small colour palette can result in some great designs and artworks. In this tutorial we’ll use Illustrator’s basic shapes and tools to create a stylized landscape scene illustration then finish it off in Photoshop with the addition of some texturing.
My number one most popular tutorial from last year described the process of creating a trendy retro cityscape in Photoshop. I’ve noticed the retro and vintage styles are still in vogue, so today let’s take a look at creating another design that captures the abstract theme of old album art. Follow this step by step Photoshop tutorial to manipulate a landscape photo with various color adjustments and lay out a typographic quote to create a retro style landscape design.
No doubt you’ll have heard of the term Cinemagraph since it exploded onto the Internets. Originally coined by Photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, a cinemagraph is a clever revival of the classic animated GIF. It combines features of video and photography to create a the illusion of a still image but with cool motion effects. Let’s take a look at how to create your own animated GIF cinemagraph by playing around with Photoshop’s animation tools.
