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Mastering Illustrator Effects

Mastering Illustrator Effects
Have you been missing out the Illustrator Effects? Did you know it is a powerful tool for creating symmetrical shapes or adding texture to vector paths? For example, with just one simple effect, you can turn a polygon path into a flower shape. You can also make paths look sketchy with the Scribble effect. Arrowheads Let's start with a basic effect, the Add Arrowheads. Appearance The great thing about using Illustrator Effect is the ease of changing its appearance. Without The Effect? Without the effect, the arrow shape will get distorted when the line is stretched. Round Corners Draw a rectangle shape, go to Effects > Stylize > Round Corners and enter a radius value. Without The Round Corners Effect? Round Corners is one of my favorite effects. Zig Zag Effect Draw a straight line, go to Effects > Distort & Transform > Zig Zag and enter a value for Size and Ridge Per Segment. Wavy Line Draw a straight line, apply the Zig Zag effect, select Smooth Points, and you will get a symmetric wavy line.

26 Most Recent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials It’s been such a long time since we have posted an article on Adobe Illustrator Tutorials. So, in today’s post, we’d like to share with you these step-by-step tutorials that were released since January of this year to give you a dose of new ideas when trying to design so that you’ll achieve a more beautiful and creative artwork. We’ve handpicked these tutorials because Adobe illustrator offers a variety of advanced tools to smooth out any design, optimize structure proportions and emphasize some beautiful details. Here are the 26 Most Recent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials that we’ve found around the web which are helpful in learning new techniques in brushing up your vector design skills. Create a Lava Island Scenario in Illustrator In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a Tiki and Maori culture inspired lava island scenario in Illustrator. Create a Hellboy Poster in Illustrator In this tutorial, you’ll apply pen tool and blending modes to make a cool hellboy poster in illustrator.

Create Vintage and Grungy Digital Art Work in Photoshop Follow this step by step design process for my recent digital art work, High Voltage. The design process involves photo manipulation, creating patterns, mixing images, textures and blend modes to to create a vintage and grunge theme. Learn how a range of Photoshop techniques pull together the various elements to create the final design. Open up your chosen image in Photoshop. Here I’ve picked out a nice Pylons near wheat field shot from DepositPhotos. Make small Levels adjustments to increase the contrast slightly. If you are planning to use your work for poster printing, use a high DPI (between 150-300dpi) and CMYK Color Mode. Add Curves Adjustment Layer (go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) and change the drop down menu to select the Red channel and make adjustments. Change the drop down to the Green channel and make adjustments to the tones controlled by this channel, and finally adjust the Blue channel. Change the Blend Mode to Linear Dodge (Add) and Opacity to 50%. 3200% zoom

70 Of The Best Photoshop Actions For Enhancing Photos | Creative The compilation consist of 70 of the best Photoshop actions collected from all around the web from photo effects to actions for even creating photo borders, An essential design resource for all designers weather your an expert or an beginner. Photoshop actions consist of a series of menu commands such as i.e. filters, image adjustments etc which can be recorded and played back this process is called a Photoshop action. Photoshop actions are perfect for novices to Photoshop simply because it allows you to apply multiple different photo effects to an image within a few seconds without having knowledge about the ins and outs of Photoshop. Photo Effect Actions 1) Double sketch effect action for Photoshop This action offers a “double” sketch effect, just like if you painted the sketch twice, once from left to right, and once from right to left. 2) Photoshop Action – Bright Eyes A Photoshop action to enhance the appearance of the eye but only works with blue eyes. 3) Pencil Draw Photoshop Action

Making Complex Selections in Photoshop - DesignFestival Making precise selections in Photoshop is an essential skill that every designer needs. As a print designer, you will find yourself using selections to remove objects from their background to place within ads. As a web designer, you might extract an image and place it on a website with no background. So, what do you do when you have something that is extremely difficult to select with normal selection tools? Even with the masking and channels, you can’t make a precise selection consistently. You can try the quick selection tool, which does a great job of making a selection of the bulk of the image, but making a more refined selection is difficult with this method. In comes Refine Mask to the rescue. The Refine Mask menu is one of the best tools for refining your selection. Each view has its own purpose, but the best views for contrast would have to be On Black, On White, and Black & White. We can fix this by using the Smart Radius Slider. This is called fringe.

Adobe Illustrator Toolbox - Web Design Blog – DesignM.ag Get the FlatPix UI Kit for only $7 - Learn More or Buy Now If you’re interested in improving your skills with Adobe Illustrator or finding resources that can make you more effective and efficient with your time in Illustrator, this is the collection for you. Articles: For getting started and learning more about Illustrator, here are some helpful articles. 7 Things You Didn’t Know Illustrator Could Do – Attitude Design Journal Illustrator’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide – VECTORTUTS Illustrator Pen Tool Exercises – Veerle Maintaining Rhythm and Flow in Vector Character Design – VECTORTUTS Seven Helpful Techniques for Illustrator – VECTORTUTS Best Sites for Illustrator Tutorials: For continual learning of Illustrator, these 9 sites produce excellent tutorials that will help you in your development. Vectips Veerle’s Blog Blog.SpoonGraphics GoMediaZine AiVault Bittbox N. Vectordiary Collections of Tutorials: Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – Smashing Magazine Illustrator Tutorials – Designer Today Vectors:

Create Retro Futuristic Poster Design in Photoshop Combine stock photos and design resources to create an awesome retro futuristic poster. By mixing up bright and vibrant cosmic designs with old, distressed and grungey textures we’ll create a print-ready retro futuristic poster design for “Yugoslav Airlines”, the former national carrier of Yugoslavia. Follow this step-by-step tutorial and learn how a range of Photoshop techniques pull together the various elements to create the final design. First let’s take a sneak peak at what we’ll be creating. Fire up Adobe Photoshop and create a document with your desired poster dimensions (I used standard A3 paper size) and fill background with white color. To start, create new group (Layer > New > New Group), give it appropriate name like “poster”, then with Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) draw a rectangle that is a bit smaller then canvas (give it 5mm on each side). Download and open Handmade Paper, Desaturate the image (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + U) to remove its colors and import into our design.

80+ Photoshop Actions for Giving Your Pictures a Vintage Look | Photoshop actions are great. With just a click of a button you can apply a complicated effect to a photo instantly. One of the most popular type of actions is the vintage or retro style. With the popularity of vintage-inspired Instagram filters and film emulation, the older style is desired with many photos. Fortunately, there are plenty of quality Photoshop actions that will help you to get vintage effects quickly and easily. Instagram Filters (13 actions) Lomocam (10 actions) Lomo Action Hard Lomo Action Holgarizer Vintage Light Leak Action Vintage Heaven Action Vintage Dream Action Retro Cross Action Vintage Matte Action Faded Film Action Old Film Action Retro Style Actions (10 actions) Instant Hipster (10 actions) Prestalgia (10 actions) Vintage Gold Action Aged Black & White Action Glory Days Vintage Actions (7 actions) Muted Colors Vintage Action Old Tones (6 actions) Vintage-Inspired Actions (4 actions) Minty Tint Vintage Action

Turn Any Font Into a Sketch Font in Illustrator This blog post was previously published on our blog in 2009, and since it was so popular with our readers, we wanted to be sure the instructions were up-to-date. So we’ve updated this tutorial to be current with the most recent versions of Illustrator. Hope you enjoy revisiting this helpful tutorial in Illustrator CS6 & CC style. Want to see other articles revamped? Here are some popular sketch fonts available that are great for grungy and hand-drawn designs and illustrations. Tutorial Details Program: Adobe Illustrator CS6 – CCDifficulty: BeginnerTopics Covered: Appearance panel, Graphic StylesEstimated Completion Time: 10 minutes Final Image Below is an example of the sketch font we will be creating. Step 1 Create a new document and with the Text tool (T), type out some text with the font of your choosing. Step 2 With the text selected, take off any stroke and fill. Step 3 With the no fill and no stroke text selected, open the pop-up menu in the Appearance panel, and chose Add New Fill.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – Best Of - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Over years Adobe Illustrator has become the standard application when it comes to illustration design. Artists, illustrators and graphic designers use Illustrator to create vector-based graphics which — contrary to raster-based editors such as Adobe Photoshop — can be easily rescaled without the loss of quality. E.g., Illustrator is often used to quickly transform hand-drawn sketches on a sheet of paper into lively and colorful digital images. However, to master Adobe Illustrator isn’t easy; and the creating process of professional illustrations requires both time and patience. In this post we present a collection of excellent Adobe Illustrator tutorials for beginners and advanced designers. Please notice that we’ve selected only those tutorials which haven’t been featured last year or were released after the article was published.you might also be interested in Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – Best Of we’ve presented few weeks ago. Illustrator Tutorials Sources and Resources

40+ Vintage and Retro Photoshop Actions 499 shares 10 Places to Get Photoshop Actions Delivering high quality images is something every designer should worry about, especially with images being such an important part of a design. Read More 1523 shares 20 Excellent Examples of Photo Manipulation Photo manipulations are fun to create and fun to look at. 20 Photoshop Actions to Add Flair to Your Photos The non-professional photographers among us are often left with boring and flat shots from our cameras, the photos lack the flair and energy that is achieved with expert techniques and equipment. Photoshop Actions on the other hand, can help recreate some amazing photo effects, just by pressing a button! This post rounds up 20 of the best Photoshop Actions that allow you to easily spice up your photos with popular effects, including HDR, Soft Focus, Lomo, Velvia and more! The Original To test out each Photoshop Action, and to allow the action to be compared against other actions on the same shot I’ve downloaded this sample image, courtesy of SXC. Compare this shot with each of the following actions, which one is your favourite? Fuji Velvia Effect Recreate the popular photo effect originally created by using Fuji’s Velvia range of film, with this fab action from Pibweb. Sepia Effect Create a simple vintage Sepia toning effect with this action from 4thDynasty Dark and Cold Photo Effect

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