Jeff Finley and his band of designers have just released their latest series of vector artwork…Vector Pack 12. This series is definitely a bit more dark and graphic than past releases. As a brand, Go Media is definitely pushing themselves to become the leader when it comes to providing great artwork resources. The level of detail in this recent release is simply amazing. If you’re into dark and horrific imagery, you need to look no further than the Zombies and the Guts packs.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the largest release to date from Go Media. I’ve counted up a grand total of 190 graphic elements in this release. If you take the value of purchasing the entire package at $34.90 that winds up being only 18 cents per element…that’s a great deal! All in all seven individually themed packs:

• 8-Bit Pixel Art
• Zombies
• Guts & Slime
• Tiling Halftones
• East Asian Folk Art
• Linework 2
• Tattered Scrolls

If you’re a design like myself, or just like collecting great resources for your library you should stop by and check out what Go Media has to offer. If you want to check out what you can do with the vector elements check out my Grunge Styled Banner Tutorial. Also, look for more tutorials from GrandmasterB to be coming up later this month. Subscribe to The Feed so you don’t miss out.

~ GrandmasterB

During my search here at the office for some inspirational t-shirt designs I came across the Holy Grail of inspiration…T-Shirt Factory! This site is simply amazing and worth the visit just to check out some of the designs, but they’ve also got some killer vector artwork for sale. The website originally started out as a group of freelance t-shirt artists sharing their work, then it blew up into a market for selling their t-shirt designs and vector artwork.

You all know that I am a huge fan of the work that Go Media does and they’re my favorite resource for design inspriation and design elements, but the folks at T-Shirt Factory have some top notch stuff too…some of which rivals Go Media. The extra bonus is that the t-shirt designs and vector packs are $10/each! All of their bonus packs of vectors like skeletons, clowns and freaks are all 50% off right now which is an awesome deal. There are a total of 17 sets to the skeleton bonus pack which is selling for only $85! I am definitely going to look into getting some of these vectors for future projects. I’ve posted a couple images of some of the available t-shirt designs for your viewing pleasure.

~ GrandmasterB

VectorTuts.com - New Site from the guys of PSDTUTS
PSDTUTS.com - Digitally Paint a Fantasy Tree Scene
Cuzoogle - View From the Search Engine Couch
Go Media - Freebie: Abstract Blobs & Bursts
Bittbox - Illustrator 101: Escape Text Boxes without the Mouse
Deziner Folio - 131 Web 2.0 Layer Styles for Fireworks
Fudgegraphics - Tutorial: How to extract a colour scheme from a photograph 

For the past few days, whenever I could find time I have been working on putting together a simple tutorial that will show you how to create a logo for my feature post “Heads Up Seven Up” Blogroll. The logo was created with Adobe Illustrator, which is a bit of a specialized illustration program. The reason I choose to use Illustrator for something like this is that it creates vector graphics, which is quite different from Photoshop with creates bitmap graphics. With vector graphics you can shrink, enlarge, twist and shape the images without messing up the quality of the image. I can also import the file created in Illustrator right into Photoshop to create a smaller image for web!

There are many vector drawing programs available that offer similar features like Illustrator ($599) and are a “little less expensive” too. Corel Draw and Adobe Fireworks come to mind first and foremost, but Corel Draw carries a hefty $429 price tag. Fireworks while still pricey at $149 is the next best option. The great thing about Fireworks is you can edit both vector and bitmap images. I did find another vector program that is free called DrawPlus; I haven’t used it, but it doesn’t look to bad. If you’re a student and want to purchase any type of software I suggest searching Google for “student discounted software”. With all of that out of the way let’s check out the tutorial.

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