はてなブックマーク

Turn anything into gold with the help of my Action for Adobe Photoshop! With the click of a button, this Action will play a series of adjustments that give an image a shiny appearance with yellowy hues that mimic solid gold. Upon playing the Action it will ask you to make a selection of your subject before continuing to process the effect with various Photoshop tools and filters. Making a selectio

Give your illustrations an old etched or engraved appearance with my new collection of 30 brushes for Adobe Illustrator. These brushes feature a variety of hand-drawn line patterns in horizontal, vertical, diagonal and cross-hatched orientations that can be used to apply shading to your digital drawings. After being scanned from hand-made pen strokes, they were then processed into Illustrator brus

In today’s Photoshop tutorial we’re going to have some fun changing the weather in a photograph by adding a heavy rain shower. The effect works best on night shots of dark streets to give the image a dramatic mood. We’ll amplify the subtle light reflections on the pavement to simulate the appearance of a wet surface, then add three layers of rain drops, each at different sizes to achieve the illus

Watercolour paintings are a hugely popular art style that can be incorporated into your design projects, but you don’t need to be a master artist to create such imagery when Adobe Photoshop can produce realistic watercolour effects with a cocktail of built-in filters. In today’s tutorial I take you through a range of settings that will convert any photograph into a hand-made watercolour style pain

My most popular tutorial of 2014 was my guide to creating a realistic money effect in Photoshop, which explained the steps to achieve an authentic engraved illustration style. The process is quite time consuming, so I figured it would be useful to follow it up with a ready made Photoshop Action that produces the effect automatically with just the click of a button. Choose from 3 levels of detail f

The blend tool in Adobe Illustrator is often used to create abstract wave graphics, but I’ve been experimenting with some additional adjustments and discovered some handy tricks to create sci-fi inspired digital particle waves. This kind of imagery perfectly complements hi-tech interface designs with colourful data visualisation effects, or it could be used to create abstract art in its own right.

I’ve been having fun working on a brand new set of Photoshop Actions to transform your photographs with various contrast and colour alterations. This collection of Cinematic Photoshop Actions contains 12 effects based on the colour grading aesthetics of popular movie genres, such as Horror, Western, Action, Romantic and more. The visual styles of these films are usually seen on the big screen, but

A fun personal project designers and illustrators often take part in is ’36 Days of Type’, or equivalent challenges like ‘Daily Drop Cap’ where artists express their style on a new letter or number every day. Initials have received decorative treatment throughout history, with examples dating as far back as early biblical texts. In today’s tutorial I’ll take you through the process of decorating a

I’ve been admiring some beautiful illustrations and examining the techniques the artists use to add details to their work. One popular shading method I’ve noticed is particularly prominent in apparel design and illustrations with a retro vibe is the use of stippling, where fine vector textures are added to build up tones and shade in areas of darkness. After seeing how effective this technique is,

In today’s Photoshop tutorial we’re going back to the 1980s to create a rad text effect based on those 80s style chrome logos we used to see for games, movies, TV shows and more. The overall design incorporates the classic bold chrome text effect with a hot pink script font. It’s all done in Photoshop using a mix of layer styles and colour overlays to reproduce the shiny metal effects and vibrant

How big is your font collection? If you’ve been busy downloading all the free fonts you can find, or if you’ve invested in some premium typefaces chances are you’ve got hundreds (or thousands!) of font files that are bogging down your system. Font managers are important tools that allow you to activate and deactivate your fonts on the fly, organise your collection into groups, and easily test out

This post was originally published in 2015 The tips and techniques explained may be outdated. In today’s Photoshop tutorial we’re going to create a cool portrait effect using a long passage of text that bends and deforms around the contours of the face. Known as a Calligram, this effect is particularly powerful when used to present famous quotes or speeches by depicting the author/speaker with the

In last week’s video tutorial I explained a bunch of techniques for creating letterpress style print effects in Photoshop and Illustrator. One of those techniques looked really great in Adobe Illustrator, so I thought I’d share a ready-made version so you can instantly apply those cool ink stamp effects to your logos and typography illustrations with just a click of a button! This download contain

In last week’s vector illustration tutorial I used my free set of distressed halftone patterns to add cool screentone effects to my artwork in Photoshop, then I thought; Why not create a similar set of patterns but in vector format to allow the same distressed halftone effects to be added directly in Adobe Illustrator? So I’ve been working hard to create this new set of free halftone patterns in t

I’ve been posting written tutorials on this site for many years, with most of them now buried deep in my archives. I’ve also been thinking about extending my site to include video tutorials, so I thought why not incorporate the two and produce videos for some of my most popular guides from the past? This will hopefully give newcomers a chance to check those topics out, while also updating them wit

This post was originally published in 2015 The tips and techniques explained may be outdated. Last week I posted a showcase of stunning chalk lettering designs, which gave me the inspiration to create some chalk typography myself. Unfortunately I neither have the talent or a chalkboard to produce authentic hand made chalk typography murals, but I’ve come up with a technique that designers can use

This post was originally published in 2015 The tips and techniques explained may be outdated. I recently received an email from a reader who asked for advice on how to create ropes and knots in Illustrator, which are particularly common with nautical themed designs. A custom Illustrator brush immediately sprung to mind, so I played around and perfected a technique that can be used to make any path