New techniques, fascinating effects, print design issues, icon design, Programming, Best-of tutorials, Adobe frameworks and 3D Inspiration for your projects – the Smashing Tutorials section covers numerous technologies, programmes and techniques. See what we have to offer: Smashing Tutorials, Hand-Picked Photoshop Tutorials, 50 Excellent AJAY Tutorials
Traditional drawing is certainly way harder than digital and it is true that people are able to progress much faster digitally, but one should learn the traditional type of drawing and painting before starting digital drawing, since it often lays out the foundation for screen design.
This article contains a mixture of traditional drawing tutorials, drawing techniques and some methods for transforming and preparing your creations for screen design. Some are intermediate level and some are advanced tutorials that include general theory, useful tips, comic inspired art, sketch a pencil drawing, coloring processing, character sketching, shapes, proportional, perspective and much more. We hope that drawing tutorials and techniques in this post will be a great help to you.
Read more...Ever wonder how animated films like Ice Age are made? Maya is the answer. Maya (or Autodesk Maya, having recently been acquired by Autodesk) is powerful 3D modeling, animation, texturing, rendering and visual effects software. Maya was developed for the film industry and is now being used for design, visual effects, games, film, animation, visualization and simulation.
The most significant thing that sets it apart from other 3D packages — and the reason it is used so widely in these major industries — is that it is highly customizable. Big studios can write custom code to suit their productions using the software's development kit. This makes Maya highly adaptable to any workflow.
Below, we feature tutorials that address most Maya-related topics for beginners and advanced users. These tutorials cover almost everything Maya has to offer, from modeling to the final rendering process.
Read more...Before getting started with Photoshop, we all should have first visited the "Edit > Preferences" menu and change the "Performance" settings to fit our personal taste and computer specifications, but this isn't always the case – in many situations designers simply forget these aspects.
If you never changed the default performance settings in your Photoshop or you just want to double check them to improve the Photoshop performance, here are 10 important and useful points that you may want to consider.
Maybe you already went through that bad feeling of clicking "undo" dozens of times and realizing that Photoshop wouldn't provide you with more previous steps, but this problem can be easily resolved by changing the History States setting in the "Edit > Preferences > Performance" menu.
Read more...Papervision3D (PV3D) is a popular open source 3D engine for Flash. It enables to create advanced three-dimensional objects displayed real time right in the web browser. With Papervision3D designers bring an impressive visual experience and user interaction to the web visitors. Interactive environment captivates and gives an opportunity to enjoy navigation and content exploring process. PV3D provides great solutions for product showcasing websites, advertising campaigns and portfolio designs.
Below you can find a collection of impressive Papervision3D websites and tutorials that hopefully will inspire you and give you an idea about how this technique can be used in your projects. It is important to remember that being based on Flash, Papervision3D often has similar issues in usability and is not recommended to be used in developing websites where simplicity and accessibility are essential.
Read more...Vexel art is a digital art that is an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the vector graphics technique, but is distinguished from normal vector graphics or raster images. "Vexel" itself is a mixture of two words ‘Vector’ and ‘Pixel’. Vexel designs are composed by using multiple layered shapes. It can be done in Photoshop, but vexel designs are not limited to only Photoshop; essentially, it can be done with any image editing software that has a good Pen Tool.
Below are some truly amazing examples of vexel artwork and also some outstanding tutorials that will help you to master the technique or at least get some understanding of how this technique can be used. Feel free to explore further works of the artists presented below. Enjoy and be inspired.
Read more...Adobe Illustrator is one of the best applications for making graphic artwork like logos, print designs and Web pages. As time goes on, more and more Illustrator techniques are introduced by talented designers and artists in the industry who achieve some of the best results on the Web. One hot trend nowadays is 3D effects. So, we've gathered together some 3D tutorials to give you an idea of what Adobe Illustrator offers and how to use its 3D features. This list mixes tutorials for beginners and experts.
Here then is our round-up of 50 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for 3D artwork. You'll learn a lot of techniques and good practices.
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Read more...Everyone in the business world knows the importance of posters and ads in advertising for specific products. Posters are an integral part of advertising. An eye-catching, attractive poster that conveys a professional, compelling message about a product, service or event will invariably hold the user's attention.
In this article, we have collected a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials related to posters and advertisements. You will find some are intermediate and some are very advanced, but they'll all give you a lot of direction with photo composition, illustration, coloring processing, typography techniques, pen tool tricks, shapes processing and much more.
Read more...Art and science. The two are more known to be near opposites in the world. Yet, when creativity collides with a logically inspired motif, the results can be spectacular. With a mixture of creative graphics, illustrations, 3D models, trendy typography, photo manipulations and more, you are able to create some of the most amazing art.
Posters have many uses and come in different styles. They can be hung on the walls inside your home, your office, your cubicle. They can be used for print media advertising a special event or a product branding. Some are with typography and some without. The following poster art provides a perspective of science that can only be seen from the artistic side. Links to the profiles of the known artist or source has been provided so that you may view their other designs.
So sit back and let your imagination expand as you take a scientific journey through the the eyes of many artists.
Read more...Want to save some time? Of course you do! You are probably always looking for ways to do this faster and make that easier, it's human nature! One of the best ways to save time is experience. The more experience you have, the more comfortable you are working, the more you have developed your own best methods, and with experience you know how to better avoid mistakes and disasters. So always stay hard at what you do and you will definitely save more than "just" time!
However, regardless of your experience level, there are ways to speed up the common design tasks. You should find some of these not-so-well-known tips and strategies listed below very helpful for your workflow. And please feel free to suggest more ideas in the comments to this post!
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