The set comes as .fla and .ai file.
You can download it here.

This artwork is released under “do whatever you want with it” licence.
It’s free to use it in personal or commercial projects.
It would be nice if you could let us know in the comments when you’ll put it into good use - but that’s not needed.

We’ll use this nice photo to demostrate it.

The whole object (I mean the girl and the horse) is pretty easy to cut out with pen or similar tool - but the horses’ tail might be a little tricky.

Let’s start from duplicating the first layer.

Then we choose Desaturate option from menu Color,  so duplicated layer becomes black&white.

Than we change Brightness and Contrast levels.

We go back to the orginal layer and choose Add Layer Mask option from right-click menu. We copy the black&white layer to the layer mask.

Effect is totally opposite to what we really wanted to do;)

So we choose Invert option from menu Color.

We make another copy of the orginal layer.

Now we can cut out most of the object “the normal way”, and in problematic places (like the tail) - we can simply delete it with eraser. Those places are already seperated by the mask - and we see it from the layer beneath.

There’s some grass visible on the bottom - we change this part of mask layer to solid black.

Final effect:

(I had to add some dust to the legs - there was grass still visible. Of course we would be able to do it more nicely, but I’ll leave it for the next tutorial)

If you would like to examine how it’s made a little closer - you can download the .xcf file here.

Update

Many people have a little problem with this tutorial - and I think I need to clarify it a little.

After copying and pasting the black and white layer, when you have:

You need to anchor the pasted layer in the mask - by clicking small anchor icon in the bottom of the layer dialog box.

And when I said “Effect is totally opposite to what we really wanted to do;)” - I ment that we should invert the colors (it’s written under the picture, but again I think that this was not so obvious).

Thank you for the comments - I’ll try to be more specific next time:)

The idealnalazienka.pl (it stands for ideal bathroom) is a huge (over 7,000 products) online shop based on Joomla.

If you take the amount of products there - the performace on Joomla based site is excellent.

You can take a look of the site here:

idealnalazienka.pl

Site screenshot

We also designed a brochure with the same look&feel

Brochure

On 6th June some of us went to the onAir Tour 2008 Europe Conference in Warsaw.
The main theme of the Conference was a introduction of AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology by Adobe.
AIR enables creating desktop application using tools that are used for web development (Flex, Flash or Javascript).

From logistic point of view the event was excellect (very good catering, there were some Wii video games to relax).

As for the core speeches - some where very good, others were a little less brilliant.

In my opinion the best speech was a presentation by Lee Brimelow, about AIR Conditioning. During the presenation he showed a dozen of AIR applications, which demonstrate the capabilities of this new technology. Apart from being very well written and designed - the application were deadly funny.

Another presentation that cought my attention was a presenation about website called parleys.com. It’s a database of presentations and video, that demonstrate what new values AIR technology can bring to web development.

Of course there were a lot educational and promotional materials for attendends (and tshirts ;).
There was also a lotter with a very nice main prize - Adobe Master Collection.

In general - we have a lot of new ideas and inspiration about AIR technology right now.
I would expect some tutorials and posts about AIR soon.

Links:

- official site onAIR Tour 2008 Europe
- official onAir Tour Flickr gallery

We like Wii

We got tshirts - yeah! ;)

It wasn’t so empty in the end

Take a look yourself ;)

First we start with a sketch - in our example I’ve made a very nice bear - his name is Teodore.

So - we scan Teddys’ sketch and import it to Flash (you can also make it with any other vector editor - like Illustrator or Inkscape).

You can see that Teddy is actually made from many simple shapes. We’ll create each element individually - let’s start with eyes.

Each eyeball is made from three circles. You need one black circle for base and two white circles for reflexes.
You can add radiant gradient fill to the base to make it look nicer.

Than we move to eyebrows. Make it simple rectangles first - than you can round its shape a little

Let’s move to the ears.
As you can see the ear is also build with two simple elipses. You can use radial gradient fill to make the shape of the ear more clear.

We can also flip one ear - to give a little character to the Teddy.
(just cut a part of the ear, paste it to layer above, change it’s color to something bright, and place it mirrored at the ear).

We can move to face and body now - both head and torso of the Teddy are build with simple elipses.

We use two elipses for the bear’s face.

To make the nose simply put straight vertical line in the middle of the elipse (tip: make the line a Movie Clip, select both the line and elipse - and use align option). Than finish the nose with two bent lines.

Torso is made with two elpises (Do you understand why this post is titled “Create cartoon with simple shapes”, right?). Elipses are filled with radial gradient to make it look more realistic.

Finally we move to the legs.
Outer shape is a elipse (again). To make the inner shape we need to use Pen tool. (here’s the link to tutorial how to use the pen). We fill the shapes with radial gradients.

That’s all - our Teddy bear is completed:).

Feel free to download and check the .fla file here.

You can use this to any work you would like (commercial or non-commercial). If you use it please drop a comment about it.

Cafekismus.fi is a religious organization for kids and youth.

The design is little grungy, as it should resamble noticeboard.

visit Cafekismus.fi

We’ve also made poster and postcards design for print.

The question is - should we put down our stand alone versions and move to online alternative?
What are the features of the online version?
Well - for me Photoshop Express is a very poor option actually.
It’s aimed for very amatour uses. It offers only the photo retouching - with very basic set of options.
There are no tools to authorize graphic in Photoshop Express.

If we’ll look at Photoshop Express as a basic photo retouching gadget (so it’ll look better on flickr or facebook) - it’s pretty nice and useful.
Especially the 2GB storage space and flickr/facebook integration are worth mentioning.

The sad truth is that it’s no use for any professional work though.

Normal size wallpaper (1280 x 1024)

download 1280 x 1024 wallpaper as .png

download 1280 x 1024 wallpaper as .fla

Wide size wallpaper (1440 x 900)

download 1440 x 900 wallpaper as .png

download 1440 x 900 wallpaper as .fla

GIMP Splash Image

Website is very content oriented - it features blog as a main way to communicate with users, but also have strong content management based on Joomla.

From visual side - we tried to depicted the Germanicon as it really is - small translators company, passionate about language and communication. That’s why we’ve designed very friendly and “think-out-of-the-box” layout.

We’ve also designed a logo - with bright, orange color and distinct gray.

Visit Germanicon website

Site screenshot

Germanicon logo close-up