The crew from Go Media are at it again as they just released their 13th collection of “stock” vector artwork. I use the word “stock” lightly, because their work is anything but! This latest release is chock full of great stuff and includes a total of 137 high quality, detailed vector pieces in seven individual themes. As always you can purchase the entire collection for set 13 or choose to purchase them in their individual packs, but you’ll pay almost $34 more if you were to purchase all seven packs separately. This set includes some very interesting stuff; I’m very interested to see the “Flow” pack in action as it’s got some really cool geometric shapes in flowing patterns…very cool stuff.

I’m not 100% sold on the 3D Skull collection, but I’m guessing with some tweaking and some experimentation they could be used very cleverly to create some cool artwork. The entire set has some really cool stuff in it which includes:

• 3D Skulls (mentioned)
• Robots
• Bound (Vines, Ropes, etc)
• Flow (mentioned)
• Too Sexy (sexy silhouettes – also seen on “Speed Network”)
• XTreme Sports
• Apparel

(more…)

Recently, Cuzzy from Cuzoogle.com contacted me about creating a new banner image for his blogroll post dubbed “Rolling a Blog Joint”. Since the overall premise is a play on the word joint, I thought something with a textured paper background and perhaps a pot leaf image would do the trick. Amazingly, enough there is a company named ‘Pot Leaf’ and their logo was available on BrandsoftheWorld.com, so that will save me a step of recreating the leaf in illustrator. The paper texture for the background will be a combination of a number of paper artwork that I found on Bittbox; which is a great resource for this type of stuff. So, that should be enough background on this project…let’s get ‘rolling‘.

STEP ONE: SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT

The finished size of this image will be 450p wide x 150p high, but I’m going to start with a bigger canvas size. The reason being is that I want to be able to adjust the textured background to fit, and later I will crop it out. So, let’s start out by creating a new document that’s 600×600. From there drag guides to the center at 300x and 300y and then recenter the rulers to make that point 0. After that drag out horizontal guides to +/- 75px and vertical guides to +/-225px. These outer guides will be our bounding box…all of the content will go inside this area. Anything outside the bounding box will be cutoff in the final step, so make double sure everything is inside that box.

STEP TWO: CREATING THE BACKGROUND

I want to make the background a different color from the text and leaf image, so I thought a light shade of brown would be a good contrast and it will make the paper more realistic. I’ll use a light shade (b79573) and a darker shade (7a5f43) and create a radial gradient; which will be the base of the background. Create a new layer and drag out a radial gradient starting a bit above the top guide and down towards the right corner (light to dark). We create a new layer, because I want to have a base layer that’s transparent…this layer will come into play later on in the tutorial. After you’ve made your gradient, rename the layer to ‘Base‘.

(more…)

I am usually not too big on picking up graphic design magazines, because a lot of times they’re really not worth the price you pay. Another reason is that for some reason American magazine publishers don’t seem to put many out, that are very helpful. After seeing that one of my favorite design houses, Go Media was being featured in the latest issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine I figured I would check it out.

I went over to the local Borders bookstore and after walking around the store for ten minutes (it’s a new store and it’s huge), I finally found the magazine rack. My first impression of the magazine was that it’s designed well and definitely gets the readers attention with the bright cover art. The other thing that caught my attention was the sticker price. Each issue of the magazine runs £6.00, but with the markup and the exchange rate it was $15.50 USD. I immediately thought “this magazine is going back on the rack for the next sucker”, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a free browse in store.

(more…)

I know that many of you have seen tutorials all over the place that describe how to create metallic text with Photoshop. Well, I’m here to show you how to make Killer Metallic Text and I’m going to toss in a cool background and a reflection effect. So over this two part tutorial you actually get three tutorials for the price of one. How’s that sound? Along with this tutorial I will make the final Photoshop (.psd) file available for download. I know that sometimes it is easier to figure out how something works by taking it apart first. Note: Throughout the tutorial I will give you keyboard shortcuts for picking tools or performing commands. They will be listed in parenthesis next to the task.

Let’s get started!

(more…)

The awesome folks at Go Media have released another great package of vector artwork. Vector Pack 11 has got some really great stuff (much better than #10…in my opinion). For those of you that don’t know about these vector packs they are fantastic and a must buy for anyone that is serious about design. This latest pack has some really great stuff that GrandmasterB will definitely be trying out.

(more…)