Blog.SpoonGraphics

Free Vector Doodles - Women’s Clothing & Fashion

Chris — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:00:55 +0000

It’s time for another little vector doodles freebie, this time a collection of vector graphics based on the topic of women’s fashion. The pack contains various roughly doodled clothing items, including shoes, dresses, belts, sunglasses and bags. Feel free to use them in any of your designs, hopefully they will fit right in to a fashion website or promo designs for a clothes store.

Download Vector Resources Freebie
1.1mb | 1 x Ai | 1 x EPS CS4 | 1 x EPS v10

Free Cute Furry Monster Icons for Mac, PC and Web

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:00:46 +0000

Last week I posted an Adobe Illustrator tutorial covering the process of creating your own cute and fuzzy vector monster. This week, I’ve put together a little family of monsters, available for free download in the form of icons. Each monster can be found in PNG, ICNS and ICO filetypes for use on your Mac, PC or for inclusion in your website designs.

Download Free Monster Icons
6.8mb | PNG | ICNS | ICO

This Week’s Favourites – June 20th 2009

Chris — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:00:58 +0000

For this week’s collection of creative design links check out a site dedicated to free textures, examples of awesome light graffiti, a tutorial on creating a watercolor effect, an illustrator graph tutorial and a Photoshop steampunk illustration walkthrough.

Texture Lovers

Texture Lovers is a new design site by Max Stanworth aimed at presenting free textures along with great examples of their use out in the design community.

Creative Nerds

Light graffiti is a photography craze that produces fantastic artwork through the use of light. Creative Nerds has this excellent collection of inspiring examples.

Drawing Clouds

The Drawing Clouds blog has some great retro-grunge inspired design tutorials, this walkthrough in particular shows the process of creating a fab watercolour effect.

Snap2Objects

Snap2Objects has written this very cool Illustrator tutorial covering the process of creating a three-dimensional pie chart graphic through a few simple steps.

Psdtuts

One of the latest tutorials on Psdtuts is this awesome Photoshop illustration that combines various graphics and elements to produce a steampunk inspired piece of artwork.

Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator

Chris — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:00:28 +0000

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator to create your very own super cute fuzzy monster character. We’ll be working with the basic shapes to start, then use a variety of gradients to add depth. We can then finish it off with some detailed fur effects to really lift the design from the screen.

Start work on the eyeball, draw a perfect circle on the artboard. Hold Shift to keep things in shape. Add a simple radial gradient spanning from grey to white. Adjust the gradient sliders so that the grey creeps in slightly from the edges of the circle.

Copy (CMD+C) and paste (CMD+F) the circle, scale down while holding Shift and Alt, then swap the gradient out for a couple of darker greys to form a pupil.

Repeat the process, but this time scale down the circle into position as the iris. Choose a nice bright colour for the eye, such as green. Switch the gradient to a dark and light tone of your chosen colour.

Draw a couple of specular highlights in the form of circles. Drop the opacity down to 80% to allow the underlying elements to show through.

Paste in one more circle, this time scale it up, and add a gradient from dark to light purple. The outer colour will blend into the main body, which will also be filled with this purple swatch.

Draw a huge rounded rectangle onto the artboard to form the basic body shape. Alter the curvature of the corners by using the cursor keys while dragging. Align everything up centrally down the vertical axis.

Draw a temporary shape that covers the bottom curve of the rounded rectangle. Use the Subtract from Shape Area option in the Pathfinder window to chop out the excess. To extend this flat edge, drag it downwards while holding Shift with the Direct Selection Tool.

Draw another rounded rectangle, this time to form the smiling mouth. Use another temporary tool and the Pathfinder palette to chop out the unwanted area, leaving a flat top edge.

Fill the mouth area with a radial gradient, fading it from grey to black adds a nice touch of depth, which would otherwise be a flat black colour.

Draw a couple of goofy teeth using the rounded rectangle tool. Copy the mouth shape, send it to the front (CMD+Shift+]), then use it as a Clipping Mask to hide and crop the teeth into place.

Draw a red oval to form a cheeky tongue, filled with a pink to red gradient. Use another Clipping Mask to hide the unwanted overlap.

Select the mouth shape, then go to Object > Path > Offset Path. Fill the new object with a purple gradient, then add a Gaussian Blur of around 8px to remove any hard edges.

Elsewhere in the document, draw a small circle. Use the Direct Selection Tool to drag the right hand point outwards. Remove the Bezier curves using the Convert Anchor tool under the Pen tool options, then click the New Brush Icon. In the options, choose New Art Brush, and change the color to Tints.

Now the fun part! Using the Brush tool, draw each piece of hair spanning from the body outwards. Here’s where that Graphics Tablet really comes in handy, but it’s still achievable with a mouse.

In no time the harsh outline will be invisible through the wealth of fur. Add a little extra to specific areas to flesh out the desired body shape.

Select one of the hairs, then go to Select > Same > Stroke Color. Head over to Object > Expand Appearance, then add the main body to the selection by Shift+clicking. Choose the Add to Shape Area option from the Pathfinder window to blend it all together. Add an Inner Glow from the Effects menu to add depth to the graphic, choose a darker purple and adjust the blur to control the amount of glow that appears.

Duplicate the brush graphic, then change its colour to something garish, the colour itself doesn’t matter, but it’ll be used to identify them later. Continue drawing a bunch more hairs throughout the internal body area of the monster.

Select just one of the blue hairs, then go to Select > Same > Stroke Color. Expand the Appearance then swap out the blue fill with a gradient that flows from a light pink to zero opacity. (Transparent gradients in CS4 is really required here, otherwise use pink to black and set the blending mode to Screen).

Repeat the process to fill out the monster with even more fur, the more layers, the cuter and cuddlier it becomes!

After plenty of mouse clicking or pen tapping the monster will be completely covered in thick fur.

Zoom in and tidy up any messy hairs, including any that overlap the mouth area. Copy and paste the mouth graphic, position on top and use the Pathfinder tool to crop down the hairs to size.

A simple vibrant background renders the monster illustration complete! The subtle gradients and little touches of transparency really help add depth to the design and allow it to pop from the screen.

This Week’s Favourites – June 12th 2009

Chris — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:00:39 +0000

For this week’s roundup of cool and creative links we have a collection of the top design blogs to follow; a bunch of designers who share their logo design processes; a tutorial on how to convert web design mockups into XHTML/CSS; a tutorial covering the process of creating a printed promo kit; and a compilation of sweet vector business cards.

2Experts Design

If you’re a fan of my blog here at Blog.SpoonGraphics, be sure to also check out 2Experts Design’s roundup of their top 37 design blogs to follow for lots more creative goodness.

The Design Cubicle

Following the design process of a fellow designer is a great way to pick up new tips. The Design Cubicle has this useful roundup of 16 logo design processes from a range of creative designers.

Line25

One large tutorial I recently wrote for my second site over at Line25.com covered the process of creating a complete site design. This second half covers quite a sought after topic of converting the PSD into a coded design.

Vectortuts

Graphic Design week has just finished over at the Tutsplus group of sites, which saw some exceptional print design topics being covered. One I thought was quite unique was the article: How to design and print a bold promo kit.

Vectortuts

What, Vectortuts again?! Yep! I couldn’t go without mentioning this recent roundup I created that showcases a bunch of vector business card designs. The list serves some great inspiration so feel free to drop by and check it out!

50 Inspiring Abstract Illustrations in Web Design

Chris — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:00:24 +0000

Detailed digital illustrations come in all shapes and sizes, and often make use of abstract shapes, flowing lines and bright colours. This collection of 50 inspiring abstract illustrations in web design showcases some of the best, eye popping designs out there on the net.

ANidea

IconDock

Wayne Dorrington

Bali Web Creator

DS Design

Funky Remixes

CSSStyle.me

Rob Sheridan

Adventure Drop

Danatur.de

Douglas Menezes

Naumow

Chirag Solanki

Kirdan

Weblody

Twenty2Designs

iPrimi Dieci

Titofelix

Zinaz

Lyrical Media

Sean Johnson

Fimel

ArtVisiona

Espira

DavidG

Getting Crazy

Andrew Ackroyd

Corvus

Mau Russo

Razor Braille

Ethan Gardner

Mamieboo

Web Designer Wall

Mynus

MKleyne

Jason Bradbury

I Love Colors

Radu Ceuca

Marco Xotoko

Wild About Gardening

Mirasim

Cult Foo

Color Pixel

Neweracaptalk

Oypro

Duoh

GoMediaZine

Web Designer Depot

N.Design Studio

Huge Collection of T-Shirt Design Mockup Templates

Chris — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:00:48 +0000

Templates are a handy resource for any apparel designer to mockup your awesome tee design and show it off in all its glory. Such resources can be a little tricky to come by, especially those high quality files, but check out this huge collection of T-Shirt mockup templates, featuring plenty of highly useful files in both vector and PSD format for use in your future apparel projects.

Sports Polo T-Shirt Template:

Blank Tee Photos:

DesignByHumans T-Shirt Templates:

Apparel Template Collection:

Free Blank T-Shirt Template:

VIP T-Shirt & Hood Templates:

Vector T-Shirt Template Promo Pack:

Tee Shirt Vector Template:

Free T-Shirt and Sweatshirt Template:

T-Shirt (and shoe) Templates:

Hoodie Template:

Blank T-Shirt Template - White:

Blank T-Shirt Template - Black:

T-Shirt PSD:

T-Shirt Model:

T-Shirt Template:

This Week’s Favourites – May 29th 2009

Chris — Fri, 29 May 2009 07:00:34 +0000

In this week’s bunch of creative web findings, we have a handy roundup of how-to’s on styling lists with CSS; a great Illustrator tutorial for creating mascots; a fab advertising design showcase; an excellent tutorial for creating a detailed icon; and advice from top designers on how blogging can help your business.

Dev Snippets

Dev Snippets have put together this handy list of tutorials and best practices for converting the good old HTML list into some crazy and unique uses, all through a little CSS.

VectorTuts+

Scott Jackson has written an extensive tutorial for VectorTuts+ covering the process of designing a website mascot in Adobe Illustrator. Plus, offers the complete design as a free download.

DesignM.ag

Feed yourself with some design inspiration with this advertising design showcase from DesignM.ag, featuring a range of design styles and graphics that leap from the screen and smack you right in the eyeballs.

Tutorial9

I recently posted an article rounding up the best icon tutorials, since then this fantastic tutorial appeared on Tutorial9. It’s a shame it wasn’t including in the original post, so head over and follow the steps in Adobe Photoshop to create a stylish mail icon.

The Creative Lab

A bunch of designers, including myself offered some words and experiences on how blogging can help your business. Check out this post on The Creative Lab to hear my thoughts along with some cool people from the industry.

Beginner Illustrator Tutorial - Create a Vector RSS Icon

Chris — Mon, 25 May 2009 07:00:17 +0000

The best way to learn the ropes of a new application is to get stuck in with a working project. This Adobe Illustrator tutorial covers the simple steps involved in creating a vector RSS icon and includes a range of handy techniques that can be put into practice in future creations.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics application, so it doesn’t matter what size the icon is created at. We can simply select all the objects and scale them up to the size of King Kong, or likewise scale them down to the desired size. Unlike Photoshop, all our lines and shapes will keep their crisp lines and colours because they’re made of mathematical calculations rather than good old pixels.

Open up Illustrator and create a new document. Click and hold the mouse over the Rectangle tool to select the Rounded Rectangle option hiding underneath. Draw your shape on the artboard while holding Shift, use the arrow cursor keys to adjust the roundness of the corners while dragging.

Another difference between Illustrator and Photoshop is the options sat at the bottom of the main tool palette. In Photoshop, I’m sure you’re familiar with the foreground and background swatches – In Illustrator this is replaced with the fill colour and stroke colour. Click the stroke option and clear off any defaults, then bring the fill into focus. Over in the Gradient Panel, add an orange fill that varies from dark to light vertically across the shape.

With the shape selected, go Object > Path > Offset Path. Enter -1mm in the options. Grab the corner of the new shape and rotate to 180 degrees so the gradients flow in opposite directions.

Grab the circle tool and draw a shape elsewhere on the artboard. Clear out any fill, and add a thick 16pt black stroke.

With the Direct Selection Tool (White Arrow), select only the left and bottom points of the circle. Hit delete on the keyboard to trim the circle down to a quarter.

Copy (CMD+C) the quarter circle and paste in front (CMD+F). Scale it down while holding the shift key to keep everything tight. Tip: Check the Scale Strokes and Effects option in the preferences and alter to your personal liking.

Adjust the stroke weight to match the 16pt of the original.

Press CMD+R to show the rulers, then drag a couple of guides out in alignment with the quarter circles. Using the intersection as a source, draw a small circle to finish off the traditional RSS shape.

Our two quarter circles are currently set as stroked paths, but we can quickly convert them to complete shapes by heading to Object > Expand, then selecting just the Stroke option.

With the three objects selected, add a grey-white gradient fill running vertically, and a 1pt light grey stroke.

Press CMD-G to Group the objects together, then scale and position them into place in the overall orange container.

Select the inner rectangle from the orange box, Copy (CMD-C) and Paste in Front (CMD-F). Fill it with white. One tip to remember is unlike Photoshop, Illustrator can hold multiple items in just one layer, each stackable on top of each other.

Draw a large, flat oval over the entire graphic. Pay close attention to how the bottom curve overlaps the white rectangle. With the oval and rectangle selection, click the Intersect Shape Area option in the Pathfinder palette.

Reduce the Opacity of this new shape down to around 15%, giving a sleek shine to the icon.

Finish off the graphic with a couple of specular hightlights in the form of circles. Use 15% opacity again to maintain a subtle appearance.

There we go, a simple vector RSS icon using some simple steps, but covering some of Illustrator’s powerful tools.

How to Create an Abstract Vector Design in Illustrator

Chris — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:36 +0000

A great looking abstract design can be created from the simplest of shapes. Let’s take a look at compiling various geometric shapes and objects to form a dynamic composition in Illustrator, then polishing it all up with some transparency effects to create a trendy vector illustration.

Start work sketching out a rough plan for the design, taking into consideration the composition and general style of the illustration.

Open up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. Choose a generic size such as A4, and set the Color Mode to RGB for a choice of nice, vibrant colours.

Draw a 210×297mm rectangle onto the Artboard, align it centrally then add a soft grey to white radial gradient. This subtle addition gives a little depth to the design, rather than a boring flat white background.

Pick out a colour scheme of your choice. Here I’ve used an ice-cream inspired mix of baby blues, pinks and a couple of complementing greys. Draw a square at 7×7mm, copy (CMD+C) and paste in place (CMD+F). Then, press the ENTER key to Move the square a set distance horizontally, enter 7mm into the options.
Tip: Use CMD+D after pasting a new object to repeat the last transform command.

With all the coloured squares selected, click the New Brush icon in the Brushes palette. Select New Art Brush from the list.

In the options panel, ensure the direction of the brush is correct. Click the small arrow buttons to alter the orientation of the brush flow.

With the Pen Tool, draw a smooth flowing line spanning from the bottom left corner to the upper third of the document.

With the path selected, click the recently created brush in the Brushes Palette to give a cool stripe effect.

Go to Object > Expand Appearance to convert the path to a shape, then right click and Ungroup the objects.

Rather than have all the coloured stripes end abruptly, we want to tweak them to different lengths. Draw a temporary shape that crops off one of the stripes. With the shape and stripe selected choose the Subtract from Shape Area option in the Pathfinder.

Repeat this process with the remaining stripes at different positions, giving varied lengths to the lines.

Add some depth to the stripes by changing the flat colour to a gradient. Add a couple of extra swatches that add lighter and darker tones. It’s handy to keep a copy of the original swatches to one side to allow quick and easy colour picking.

Begin to add some secondary elements to the design, such as a bunch of grey circles. Draw each shape at a different size to fill out the empty space.

Overlap this area with another collection of circles, this time choose a different colour from the palette. Add a subtle gradient to give some depth to these new shapes.

Spice up the design with a touch of transparency. Draw a couple of new circles using the pink and blue colours, then change their blending mode to Overlay to react with the colours underneath, giving a vibrant theme to the design.

With circles being a prominent theme in the design, a set of halftone style elements would fit in well. Download a copy of the Vector Halftones from Think Design.

Add a few objects to fill out the space either side of the main flowing lines. Use the Overlay blending mode, or simply reduce the opacity to tone down the elements.

A variation of the circular shapes is a circle with a stroke, giving a ring shape that still fits in with the overall theme. Continue drawing lots of tiny shapes that give plenty of detail to the design.

Draw a separate circle elsewhere on the Artboard. Use the Direct Selection Tool to select two of the points. Hit delete to crop the circle down to a quarter.

Add a thick stroke to the line, the idea is to match the width of the main flowing lines, so a little trial and error is in order to match them exactly.

Position the new curved line accurately on the end of the blue stripe.

Overlap some large circle elements using the Overlay blending mode to break up the flow of the lines slightly.

Continue adding lots of little elements to the design. The key is to place the objects so that they span outwards from the central flowing lines.

Also place objects so that they interact with each other, which helps give variety to the shapes.

Spice up the overall background with some very large, faint circles.

The vector design is just about complete. The clean lines of vector work always looks pretty cool, but I always enjoy roughing up my designs a little in Photoshop to add some interesting texture and detail.

Copy the whole illustration, then open up Adobe Photoshop. Create a new layer in proportion to the design.

Paste in the vector elements and scale to the document boundaries. Being vector graphics they can be scaled to any size until they are rendered as pixels.

Head over to SXC to find a nice canvas texture. Copy the design into Photoshop and desaturate to remove the original colour cast.

Paste and scale the texture into place in the main document. Set the blending mode to Multiply and drop the opacity down to suit.

Duplicate the vector artwork layer then go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Choose a low setting that just adds some grainy detail to the colours. Change the blending mode to Multiply and drop the opacity right down.

The illustration now has a nice grainy feel to it that contrasts against the clean and crisp line of the vector graphics.

Make any last tweaks such as a touch of Curves adjustment to bring out the darks and lights for more contrast.

The abstract vector illustration is now complete. The great thing is this type of work fits right into any type of design for print and web, or could be left as a design showcased on its own.

Blog.SpoonGraphics

Free Vector Doodles - Women’s Clothing & Fashion

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Free Cute Furry Monster Icons for Mac, PC and Web

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This Week’s Favourites – June 20th 2009

Texture Lovers

Creative Nerds

Drawing Clouds

Snap2Objects

Psdtuts

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Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster in Illustrator

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This Week’s Favourites – June 12th 2009

2Experts Design

The Design Cubicle

Line25

Vectortuts

Vectortuts

Similar Posts

50 Inspiring Abstract Illustrations in Web Design

ANidea

IconDock

Wayne Dorrington

Bali Web Creator

DS Design

Funky Remixes

CSSStyle.me

Rob Sheridan

Adventure Drop

Danatur.de

Douglas Menezes

Naumow

Chirag Solanki

Kirdan

Weblody

Twenty2Designs

iPrimi Dieci

Titofelix

Zinaz

Lyrical Media

Sean Johnson

Fimel

ArtVisiona

Espira

DavidG

Getting Crazy

Andrew Ackroyd

Corvus

Mau Russo

Razor Braille

Ethan Gardner

Mamieboo

Web Designer Wall

Mynus

MKleyne

Jason Bradbury

I Love Colors

Radu Ceuca

Marco Xotoko

Wild About Gardening

Mirasim

Cult Foo

Color Pixel

Neweracaptalk

Oypro

Duoh

GoMediaZine

Web Designer Depot

N.Design Studio

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Huge Collection of T-Shirt Design Mockup Templates

Blank Tee Template:

Hoodie Template:

Zip-Up Hoodie Template:

Zombie T-Shirt Mockup:

American Apparel T-Shirt Templates:

Blank T-Shirt Template:

Sports Polo T-Shirt Template: