Tutorials added on October 17, 2008

As evidenced by cave paintings, humans have been inspired by nature since the dawn of time. While lightning makes for amazing photographs, and japanese prints capture the awe-inspiring power of tidal waves, few of nature's forces are as subtly powerful as the rainbow. It's hard to imagine a world without the palette rainbows provide us. While 1940s movies are certainly cool to look at, living in one would be dull indeed. With that in mind, here is a collected assortment of rainbows caught in their understated beauty for your viewing pleasure and inspiration. Enjoy!

Why use real make up if you can do a digital make up and make the skin look pretty and smooth. It's simple, fast and very effective. Well, on this tutorial you will learn step by step the basics of digital make up on a persons body. First you have to get the photo you want to apply the digital make up, I choose a photo from the stock gallery of Samantha Draven.

I really like patterns and I use them a lot in my designs, that's why I want to share with you some very cool images from Daniele De Nigris. An italian designer that has a very cool style, reminds another great artist Andy Gilmore. His latest works are the ones I like the most, the repetition of symbols and different colors gives an incredible depth to the the patterns. Take a look at some of his designs below and visit his Flickr page at http://flickr.com/photos/denigrisdaniele/

What's up, people? I fell like it's been long time since I've last posted any article. Well, I come today bringing sweet illustration inspiration here from Brazil. Will Murai is a designer from S?o Paulo, and has been doing some great pieces for companies such as W/Brasil, Marvel Comics and DC comics. For me his work got a lot of that "new found deviantArt artist", eventhough he's been out there for some time now. I think you'll really appreciate these as much as I do. It just makes me want to go to art school, seriously. You may visit his Portfolio, his page at inPrint or at DeviantArt. Anyways, enjoy! Cheers. ;)

Vintage ads are awesome. We really can learn a lot from them. Colors, typography, the way the designers and artists found ways to overcome the lack of technology to produce some really amazing pieces. In this post we will feature some Vintage Ads sent to us by Enzo Gravante, a collector who has a huge collection of ads dating from 1900 to 1980 for a wide variety of categories. We will show you some from very famous Italian artists such as Gino Boccasile, Mario Puppo, Luigi Veronesi, Marcello Dudovich, Al Moore, and many others. I'm a collector since about 20 years, and I have of all categories (cars, watches, pens, pencil, cigarettes, cigars, jewelry, dressing and accessories, shoes, touristic country, medicines, cosmetics, parfums, cartoons, toys, interior design, benzine gasoline, motors, motocycles, bikes, food & beverage, postcards, lighters, pipes and accessories, typewriters, calculators, photo machines, field glasses, films, sports, covers of magazines with actor and actress, and a lot of original document about very important persons of culture) - from 1900 to 1980 - many of those are very rares and many designed (with signature) of very famous grahics (Gino Boccasile, Mario Puppo, Luigi Veronesi, Marcello Dudovich, Al Moore, and many others).

Typography is the kind of work that always catches our attention. Stefan Chinof, a Bulgarian designer not only plays a lot with typos, but makes other great pieces. These are great inspiration, from Typo to Photo manipulation, mixing it with vectors all those sweet techniques. For further pieces, visit him at DeviantArt.

Make a dark, rainy atmosphere out of a sunny street by using adjustment layers. Create rain from scratch. Create a streetlight and its reflection from scratch in Photoshop.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create an abstract background image using Photoshop only. The design has a cool wavy pattern with interesting lighting effects, like the Blackberry 9000 wallpaper. This is a tutorial you can sit down and complete in less than an hour, let’s get started.

In the realm of digital art, so many wonderful and playful genres exist that stimulate the imagination, but so few do it with the intricate style of fractal art. Fractal art is achieved through the mathematical calculations of fractal objects being visually displayed, with the use of self-similar transforms that are generated and manipulated with different assigned geometric properties to produce multiple variations of the shape in continually reducing patterns. Sounds extremely technical and not that artistic, true, but these equations create some of the most mesmerizing and inspiring artwork to emerge from the digital art arena. In this edition of our Monday Inspiration series, we look at awe-inspiring examples of the dynamic digital art sensation that is fractal art with 50 Phenomenal Fractal Art Renders. Setting across the vast sea of cyberspace to find these works was such an amazing task as so many fantastic pieces surfaced. Here are scaled-down versions of some of the most breathtaking ones that were uncovered, though the full-sized versions (linked through the image) offer a much more spectacular view of these mathematical masterpieces.

With the recent post on retro and vintage in modern web design, it’s time to put the theory into practice. We’ve scoured the Web to find some impressive Photoshop tutorials that can help you achieve an "old-fashioned" look-and-feel in your designs. In this post, we go back to the 1900’s all theway to the 1980’s to showcase a variety of vintage- and retro-inspired designs that involve poster art, collages and graphical elements. Whether you’re into print design or web design, you’ll find something you can use or build upon. Without further ado, we present 35 high-quality vintage and retro Adobe Photoshop tutorials that may help your design… well, travel back in time.

Movie posters are art and, unfortunately, the forgotten one. In the early years of cinema history, they were used just like advertising material. Displayed in theatres only, movie posters had the same function as a menu in a restaurant: what feast can I enjoy this evening? Nowadays, movie posters play a big role in cinema memorabilia collection. They have lost the “informative” tone to wear a more artistic and decorative dress. We want to change it with this post. Made in many different sizes and versions, and released in different moments all along a movie’s life, posters immortalize in one static image the feeling and the atmosphere of a motion picture. Some posters can be dark or try to frighten the audience, others bedazzling with bright colors; some can be someway informative, while others can be fully teasing and may provide you only the date when movie will be released, even if you may not know what the movie is about. In this post we present you a showcase of 50 beautiful movie posters. We went through different decades of movie history and different genre, different graphical approach, colors and style. Movies the posters are about may be famous or not, this is not the point. Movie posters put together the love for for two different visual arts: cinema and graphics. Enjoy!

Today we are happy to release Swirls, Flowers and Circles, a vector graphics set designed by Pien Duijverman from Netherlands. The vector graphics can be downloaded for free and is available in formats AI (Adobe Illustrator CS3) and EPS (8.0). Download the Set for Free! You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The icons may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

AJAX provides Web developers with plenty of opportunities to enhance the user experience and improve the performance of their websites. There are countless ways that AJAX can be used, and fortunately there are plenty of good and useful AJAX tutorials out there to help you with your own implementation. This post serves as a collection of useful tutorials on working with AJAX in a wide variety of ways. You’ll find tutorials on working with forms, building shopping carts, creating chat features, working with log-ins and usernames and much more.

Pricing tables play an important role for every company that offers products or services. They are a challenge from both a design and usability standpoint. They must be simple but at the same time clearly differentiate between features and prices of different products and services. A pricing table should help users pick the most appropriate plan for them. A company should carefully examine its product portfolio and pick the most important features to present in its pricing plans. Visitors should be given only the information they would be interested in: available features, options and costs. The rule of thumb is: every unnecessary cell in your pricing table increases the probability of losing potential customers, because you make it more difficult for them to compare various plans and select the best one. Once you have identified the most important features, go ahead and create a more detailed list of features for users who are interested in a particular plan. Users must know what kind of a product they are spending their money on and all of the features associated with it.

We collected beautiful portraits of children who lived in poverty but are now supported by charitable organizations. These photos were shot by photographers, photojournalists and organizations who have tried to improve the conditions of children in poor countries. The money these organizations raised gave these children hope, a future, something to rely on and something to believe in. There are millions of children out there who need your help. And you can help them by donating to the Global Fund and donating to Kiva.

Photoshop is great for embellishing display text with little effects. When you add layer styles into the equation, you have the added benefit of the styles being easily transferrable.

In this tutorial I will show you how to repair some image noise from a low quality shot and I will show you an extremely quick and easy way to smooth out a person's face. The woman in this shot is not a model and she has a lot of character so we don't want to over do it with the smoothing. We will make it look real and natural - Kyle Pero.

In this tutorial I will show you how to spice up a fairly dull and flat photograph. It’s very easy and fast! From flat photo to uniquely lighted style.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to take an image, in this case a woman's face, and give the appearance that it is entirely composed of vector shapes. Along the way, we'll use some fairly basic techniques, including clipping masks and displacement maps, to achieve a unique effect! - Bill Labus.

Today and tomorrow - depending on where you are in the world - it's Blog Action Day 2008 and I'm happy to announce the "Solving Poverty" contest badges and tees are up for sale on CafePress. All proceeds from the sales will be sent to Kiva as loans for entrepreneurs in developing nations.