In this tutorial, we’re going to paint a cartoon version of the ‘near-iconic’ Stephen Fry. The cartoon is styled in a comic book fashion but however, there’s still some painting to be done and this in the end, will be make the final image quite detailed.

Step 1

Starting off with a sketch of a younger Stephen Fry, I sketched out his prominent features such as his hair, slightly narrowed nose, dreamy eyes and chubby cheeks.

Step 2

Select the Pen Tool (P) and make sure the “paths” is chosen.

Step 3

I dragged the Fry sketch into the the main document window and resized it before tracing the face out in a layer above it. By the way, the document size is 1100 by 1300 and this makes the document window a portrait by orientation.

Step 4

After filling the path with a #f3dec6 colour, name the the layer “face base.”

Step 5

Secondly, make a  pen selection for the neck. Note that I didnt select both the face and the neck at the same time in one layer. This was because, I wanted to have a clear outline of the jaw area when I start painting the face.

Step 6

Fill the selection with the same base colour as the face and name the layer “neck.”

Step 7

a Soft Round brush with a #bb856d colour and in between painting, switch its opacity back and forth between 20% to 30%. Name the layer “face shade.” Using the Sketch as reference, trace out the features of the face and neck as shown below. This would be called the “shade” layer.

Step 8

For another layer, “dark shade.” Change the brush colour to #050404 with its opacity reduced to 10%, add more shades to the face and neck. The features here are made more pronounced. Use the Blur Tool (R) to smooth out of the paintings of all the “shades” layers too.

Step 9

Over the “dark shade” layer, create another layer and call it “highlights.” Set brush colour to #fef4f0 and reduce its opacity to about 30%. Paint the around the areas of the forehead, nose, cheeks, necks and ears. The result is a splash of light over the face.We’ll now go on ahead to merge the “face shade” layers down to the “face base” layer by pressing Crtl+E. Also go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and set the Ratio to give both the merged layers a slight grainy look.

Step 10

For the eyebrows we’ll go to the Brushes Palette and fade the brush with the Fade Size set at 50.

Step 11

Paint the eyebrows.

Step 12

Select the Burn Tool (O), and on the “face” layer (the previously merged layers), burn out the outlines of the face. That is, the wrinkles below the eyes, the outlines of the nose and so on. With a larger brush size, burn the ares of the cheeks, chin, jaw, neck etc. The Range of the brush must be set to Highlights and its exposure reduced to 20%.

Step 13

Now set the Burn Tool’s Range to Midtones (Exposure: 25%) and proceed to burn the same areas highlighted above. With the Burn brush size reduced to 1px to 2px, work on the outlines of the face and neck as well. Now the image is given more solidity.

Step 14

In a new layer, use the Pen Tool to trace out Fry’s hair.

Step 15

Fill the hair with a black colour.

Step 16

Still on the “hair” layer, select the Brush Tool (B) and set its colour to #53524f and paint strips of lines on the hair. Never mind exceeding the boundaries of the hair when painting over it.

Step 17

Now for the interesting part. Select the Smudge Tool (R) and set its Strength to 80% and smear the grey lines over the hair in the form of waves. On the edges of the hair, smudge inwards. It will take your intuition to get the desired look you prefer.

Step 18

Reduce the size of the Smudge brush to 2px and create thin strains of hair. Also select the Dodge Tool (O) with an Exposure of 30% to lighten up certain parts of the hair.

Step 19

Create a new layer, “eyes” and use the Pen Tool trace out the eyes of Fry and fill with a white colour.

Step 20

Use the Burn Tool to darken to the corners of the eyes.

Step 21

Draw two circles with the Ellipse Tool (U) and fill with a dark blue colour.
Have the circles halved by using the Marquee Tool (M).

A.

With the Soft Round Brush’s colour set to #acbaef and paint the insides of the eyes – the pupils to be exact.

B.

Change the brush colour to a white one to add a reflection to the eyes.

Step 22

Create a “lips” layer to draw the lips with the Pen Tool.

Step 23

Fill with a the colour #d16159. This colour would be used as the base and so its by no means a lady’s red lipstick colour.

Step 24

Lighten up the lips with the Dodge Tool and with a white brush, paint the lips concentrating most particularly around the edges.

Step 25

For a dark shade, use a Soft Round brush with colour: #3e0f06 and opacity at 30%.

Step 26

With a little more retouching, use the Burn Tool to make the lines of the face more prominent (the insides of the cheeks as well). The face is now complete.

Step 27

For a muscular physique (something Fry doesn’t possess), use the Pen Tool to trace out his body. You may use the Add Anchor Point Tool to create more anchor points to enable more smoother curves.

Step 28

Still with the Pen Tool, right click and select Stroke Path for a lighter lines (I had the foreground colour as ash colour).

Step 29

The resulting Stroke makes the body outlines faint.

Step 30

We’ll now create a superhero logo with the Ellipse Tool and by pressing Crtl+T, rotate the obilque circle.

Step 31

Fill the circle with a yellow colour: #faf574. Draw another circle of the same size and fill with black.Dont forget to clear the outlines of each shape after its been filled with a colour.

Step 32

In another layer, draw a five rectangles (rotating each rectangle) for a question mark shape. Fill with the same yellow colour as above. Draw another square in a new layer and add a Stroke Layer Style and change its default color to black. I just made this question mark logo for humour.

Step 33

Draw the hands of our ‘hero’ with the Pen Tool and with the colour #f3dec6.

Step 34

Set the Burn Tool’s Range to Midtones and Exposure to 28%. Burn the around the edges of the hands.

Step 35

Switch the Burn Tool’s Range to Highlights. I also shaped knuckles with the Erazer Tool (E) thereby making them more defined. A noise Ratio of about 2.9% was added was added as well.

Step 36

For the superhero costume with a synthetic look, apply a Soft Round brush with a #e7e4e1 colour within the body’s shape. Paint out a arms, abdomen and chest. Along the way, reduce the brush’s opacity to about 30% for a lighter shade within the body.

Step 37

Select the Burn Tool (Range: Highlights and Exposure: 15%) to and apply at the base of the logo. A light blue line (#e1ecf5) was added to the left side of the body for effects.

Step 38

Select the “face” layer and go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and set the Brightness to 16. Do same for the hands. We now have a brighter and smooth looking face.

Step 39

Up in the sky. Its a bird, its a plane, its…just Mr. Fry. The comic book styled version of Stephen Fry’s completed and I had the time, I would have created a more elaborated costume for him with a cape and all.

This is the final image with an added background.

By David Ella Ella

The difficulty with creating a phone is its 3d posture. Since we’re not creating a flat image, it will be a bit cumbersome to mark out the shape with rulers or guidelines to position the various elements of the Nokia phone.

Step 1

We start off by setting up a 900 by 780 pixel document with a white background and a resolution of about 200 dpi. Drawing a rounded rectangle, on the Tools bar, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and set its corners to 32 px on the Tool Presets. Right click, and enter its Fill Colour as #575b5f

Step 2

Clear the new shape’s outline by selecting it with the Marquee Tool and pressing Delete. Go to Edit > Transform > Skew or press Ctrl+T  and then right click to select Skew.

Step 3

Not done yet with the shape, right click again (while still in the Free Transform mode) and choose Distort. Duplicate the layer to use for later.

Step 4

Select the Magnetic Lasso Tool (L) and use the edges of the rectangle.You can
press the Delete key when it appears your line is off the path.

Step 5

Select the Gradient Tool (G) and on the Gradient Tool Presets, set its
Opacity to about 87%.

The Colours of the Stops are shown below:

Step 6

Now within the select, drag from right to left with the Gradient Tool. Then clear the Marquee selection. Name this layer “front bevel.”

Step 7

The shape of the Nokia 7610 is a little bit of that of a candy bar. So, hit Ctrl+T and select Warp and add a slight curve to the top, right and bottom parts of the rectangle.

Step 8

Place the previously duplicated layer over the “front bevel” layer and scale to fit within the bevel.

Step 9

Set the Foreground Color to #f2f2f5 and select the Paint Bucket Tool (G). Click within the rounded rectangle duplicate and name it “front 1,” if you’ve got a better name.

Step 10

Duplicate the “front 1″ layer and go to Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur and set the Blur Radius to 5.0 pixels.

Here’s the result. Also resize the blurred rectangle within the rectangle and name it “front 2.”

Step 11

Create a new layer  ”front shade” and with the Rounded Rectangle Tool at 34 px, draw a narrow rectangle somewhat to the left. Fill colour: #2e2e35.

Step 12

We’ll now blur the rectangle at about 40.1 pixels (Filter > Blur > Gaussian).

Step 13

Select “front 1″ layer and add a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style to it with the following parameters below:

For Contour, select Linear and reduce its Range to 45%.

Step 14

Still on the “front 1″ layer, apply an Inner Shadow Layer Style with the parameters below:

The resulting effects gives the front bevel a lifted appearance.

Step 15

For a new layer, select the Polygonal Lasso Tool and shape the selection as shown below.

Step 16

Select the Gradient Tool and edit the Gradient by setting its Color Stops from the left as: 1. #eff0f1 2. #e8e3e3 3. #645567 4. #27272a 5. #7b7b7d. The Opacity Stops from the left are: 9%, 9% and 95% consecutively.

Step 17

Drag the Gradient Tool within the selection.

Step 18

Go to Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur and set the Radius to 6.4 pixels. This creates a shade on the right-hand side.

Step 19

Within the Free Transform mode, select the Distort Tool and adjust to the left and bottom of the side shade. Name the layer “side shade2.”

Step 20

Create a new layer “screen” and draw a Rounded Rectangle with 2 px rounded corners. Pressing Ctrl+T, use the Skew Tool to adjust the shape accordingly.

Fill with colour: #7e9ab2.

For the following layers, we’ll be drawing circles. Starting with a “circle 1″ layer, select the Ellipse Tool (U) to draw a circle while holding down the shift key to constraint the circle to a perfect shape.

Fill with colour #bccbd8 and reduce Opacity to 68%.

For the “circle 2″ reduce its Opacity to 90%.

For “circle 3″, reduce its Opacity to 50%.

For “circle 4,” reduce Opacity to 70%. Note: I drew two purple circles here because I just wanted to work faster. But if you want, could give both circles their own respective layers.

For “circle 5,” reduce the Opacity to 55%.

For “circle 6″ reduce Opacity to 50%.

Finally for both “circle 7″ and “circle 8,” reduce their opacities to 50% and 70% respectively.

Step 21

On the Layers Palette, pressing Ctrl+E, merge all “circle” layers right down to the “screen” layer. Then select the Polygonal Lasso Tool and on its Presets, set Feather to 2px. Make a selection around the screen.

Step 22

Right click the selection and choose Select Inverse to invert the selection outside the screen area.

Step 23

Hit the Delete key and you’ll have the overlapping circles cropped within the screen area.

Step 24

The next couple of steps would be crucial in the enhancement of the translucent appearance of the Nokia phone. By selecting the Gradient Tool, set both the Gradient Color Stops to #f1f2f5 and #f3f4f9 respectively. For its Opacities: 40% and 85%.

Select the Polygonal Lasso Tool yet again, make a selection Feathered at 2px around the screen and thereafter, drag diagonally upwards (with a short stroke) within the selection. The layer should be named “screen gloss.”

Step 25

For the  next layer: “side gloss,” make the selection as shown below. When done, select the Gradient Tool with the same gradient colours from the previous one, except the opacities should be set to
10%and 70%. Now drag the Gradient Tool from right to left.

The result:

Step 26

On the Layers Palette, select the “screen” layer. Using the Burn Tool (O), with its Range set to Midtones and Exposure at 35, burn certain areas of the screen as shown below:

The result eventually unifies the new shade of the screen with rest of the phone.

Step 27

Create a new layer and name it “navi pad.” With the Rectangle Tool, draw a rectangle and use the Distort Tool while in Free Transform mode Ctrl+T) to set the shape diagonally.

Step 28

Still in the Free Transform mode, right click the shape and select Warp to give the rectangle a slight curve on both its width. Thus, giving it a convex shape.

Step 29

Hide the “navi pad” layer by clicking on the eye icon next to it. In a layer, draw a rounded cornered square at 30 px. Now, unhide the “navi pad” layer and have it merged with the layer containing the rounded cornered square by pressing Ctrl+E.

Step 30

On the merged “navi pad” layer, add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style to it with the parameters below:

Step 31

Follow it up with an Inner Glow style.

After applying the styles and a Gaussian Blur with a Radius of 10.5 pixels, draw another rounded square in a new layer.

Step 32

Apply a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style to the square.

Add a Contour: Contour type set to Cone and its Range increased to a 100%.

Now we’ve succeeded in creating a shiny metallic look. Name the layer “pad” if you wish.

Step 33

In another layer, draw a rounded square of the same corners with that of the pad within the pad itself. This new square will only serve as a guideline for the selection we’re about to make.

Step 34

Now select the “pad” layer and with the Magnetic Lasso Tool, make a rounded square selection. Press Delete.

And there you have it. Don’t forget to delete the layer with the previously drawn square.

B.  

Add a Drop Shadow style to the “front bevel” layer.

Step 35

For an “ear piece” layer, draw a rounded rectangle at 32px and fill with the colour # 6b6b6f.

Step 36

Add a Stroke layer Style with the Colour set to #626367.

The result:

Step 37

Draw another shape above the “earpiece” layer and fill with #303033.

Step 38

Apply a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style:

Also add a Contour with its type as Cone.

The resulting effects:

Step 39

For the left and right buttons, draw flat rectangles (with corners at 52 px) but with
the latter shorter in length than the other.

These are the Gradient Overlay Styles for both buttons:

The first Gradient’s angle should be at 180 degrees for the left button while the second, rotated at zero degrees for the right button.

Step 40

Creating a “send” button, select the Pen Tool (P) make a sketch with twelve simple points as shown below. Do the same for the “end” button and add a small circle underneath it.

Step 41

Apply a Gradient Overlay Style for both “send” and “end” buttons (green for send and red for end).

The result:

Step 42

If you wish, you could have your buttons arranged under a group. By clicking on the third icon fron the right, create a new folder named buttons. Drag all four buttons into the “Buttons” folder.

Step 43

Given the absence of the appropriate font for the Nokia logo, We’ll tweak a pre-installed font that would best represent that of Nokia’s. Select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and its font as Micro Style Bold Extended ATT. If you don’t have the Type Tool Presets displayed, go to Window > Character. Proceed to have the width and length of the text horizontally and vertically scaled.

Step 44

This is how close we’ll come repliicating the Nokia logo.Duplicate this text layer to use later.Also have it tilted with the Rotate Tool in Free Transform mode.

Step 45

Behind the face of the phone is something like a backplate (its a slider actually). Draw a rounded rectangle with its corners set at 35 px and fill the shape with the colour #e7e6ea.

Step 46

Apply an Inner Glow style to the “backplate” Layer.

Step 47

Position the “backplate” behind the front bevel and if necessary, scale it as shown below:

Step 48

Another rounded rectangular shape (35 px) will be positioned behind the “backplate.”

Step 49

We’re almost coming to the final back of the phone.Draw a rounded rectangle at 42 px and fill with colour: #2c2c2c. This should be followed by a Stroke Style and the opacity of the layer itself reduced to 59%.

Step 50

Position the red rounded rectangle behind the plates and use the the Free Transform’s Distort Tool to extend part of it from the bottom.

Step 51

Finally for the back cover, draw a rounded rectangle.

Step 52

We now a Gradient Overlay Layer Style:

An Inner Glow style was added as well with its Colour set at #ebe6e7.

Step 53

A metal-like tag with the Nokia’s logo can replicated with a rounded rectangle with its corners set at 1 px. Pressing Ctrl+T, and right clicking for the Distort Tool, bend the edges of the shape inwards.

Step 54

These are the Bevel and Emboss Style parameters of the “tag” layer.

Step 55

Press Ctrl+T to Rotate, Scale and Skew the Nokia text to fit into the tag.

Step 56

Create a new layer “background.” Selecting the Gradient Tool (set at Radial), edit its Colours as shown below:

Step 57

With the Gradient Tool, drag downwards from the center of the workspace.

Step 58

Select the Brush Tool (B), and on its Presets choose a Soft Round Brush with its size ranging from about  42 to 180 px. Set the brush colour to #decfd9.

Step 59

For the smaller bluish and faded white circles, set the brush colour to
#cdcdf9 and #eff7f9 and sizes from 35 to 55 px respectively.

Step 60

Head on over to freephotoshop.org to download some circle shapes for free. Unzip the files to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS(x)\Presets\Custom Shapes. Select the Custom Shape Tool (U) and on the Custom Shape Picker, choose the shape shown below.

Worthy of note is that the settings of the Custom Shape Tool should have ‘Fill Pixel’ selected, Mode set to Soft Light and Opacity set to 35%. Changing the foreground colour to #eff7f9, draw the selected shape around corners of the workspace-the circles get filled automatically.

Step 61

Add a few more of these circle shapes with the colour set to #f2e6fd.

Step 62

On the Custom Shape Picker, a different type of circle as shown below.
The colours used were #f2e6fd and #e2f1ed and the shape Opacity reduced to 45%.

Step 63

Select the Line Tool (U), and on tool’s Presets, choose Paths.

Step 64

Now draw a straight line across the image and use the Add Anchor Point Tool to shape the line by dragging and adjusting. Use the Delete Anchor Point Tool to remove unneeded anchor points to make the line more smooth. Then right click the line to fill with the colour #deebf6.

Step 65

Add more lines using this technique. One or two of lines should be placed at the back of the phone.

Step 66

Add an Outer Glow to the “lines” layers.

Step 67

Reduce the “lines” layer’s Opacty to 45%.

Step 68

Still on the “lines” layer, apply a Gradient Layer Style with the parameters below:

Step 69

Our ‘near-supernova’ theme poster could end at this point, but we could still offset its ‘cosmic composition” by adjusting the lighting of the “background” layer.

Step 70

Go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects and set the Light Type to Omni. And drag the sliders to set the Properties.

It’s a wrap! It’s really a matter of preference on your choice of colours (warm and cold colours must be combined) and the intensity of light applied.

By David Ella Ella

Got a question about this article? – Ask it here!

Step 1

First off, create a new document with a white background and set the canvass size at 500 by 600 px. Increase the resolution of the document to 260 pixels. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and draw a vertical rectangle all the way down to the canvass.

Step 2

Now select the Gradient Tool (G) and on the Gradient Tool Presets or settings, click to edit the gradient. From the left-hand side, these are the colours of the “stops.” 1.#c8d3df 2.#e8edee 3.#c4c9cf 4.#e4e7e9 5.#98999a 6.#c1cad3 7.#f6f7f8. For the Opacity Stops  from the left: 60%; 65%; 50%; 60%.

Step 3

As shown below, drag the Gradient Tool within the Marquee selection.

Step 4

From the left, drag the Gradient Tool across the selection in a slightly diagonal direction.

Step 5

From the right, drag again downwards.

Step 6

Finally, from the left, drag the Gradient Tool diagonally upwards.

Step 7

Go to Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap and in the options, set the Highlight Strength to16; Detail to 10; Smoothness to 8. Deselect the Marquee also.

Step 8

Now to add more shine. Go to Filter > Sketch > Bas Relief and make the adjustments below:

The resulting effects:

Step 9

On the menu bar, select Image > Adjustment > Levels (Ctrl+L). Enter these figures for the Input Levels as shown below. The end result is to give one half of the image a faint shade or tone.

Step 10

Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves or press (Ctrl+M) and drag downwards the bottom point of the curve. Or you may enter the Input/Output figures.

The purpose of Curves is to tone just the bottom part of the image.

Step ₁₁

To shape the image, go to Edit > Transform > Warp or hit Ctrl+T. Upon shaping with the Warp, make sure the topmost white part of the image is visible as a long long strip.

Name the layer “flow.”

Step 12

We’ll now add a splash to the streaming flow of water. In a new layer, draw an ‘amoebic’ shape (if you’ll pardon the expression) with the Pen Tool (P) and fill with #e0e0e9.

Step 13

Still on the “splash” layer, go to Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap and make the adjustments below. Follow this up with a Bas Relief effect (Filter > Sketch > Bas Relief). Do make sure Light is set to Bottom Left.

The result:

Step 14

Now to create a proper splash-like shape. Go to Filter > Liquify (Shift+Ctrl+X) and select the Forward Warp Tool (W) in the Liquify window.Under the Tool Options, set Brush Size at 11, Density at 50 and Pressure at 60. Now with the Forward Warp Tool, extend edges of the shape in various directions.

Step 15

Select the Bloat Tool (B) and hold down briefly to create bloated portions of the image. the Brush Pressure and Size could be adjusted slightly according to your personal preference. Just don’t make the brush too sensitive by increasing it’s Pressure.

Step 16

Add a Bas Relief effect: Filter > Sketch > Bas Relief.

Step 17

In a new layer, draw a shape with the Rectangle Tool (U) that would form the background. Add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style and set the colours of the Stops from the left: 1.#9397a0 2.#252d4f 3.#6b7074. Reduce the opacity of the “background” layer to 50%.

Step 18

Select the Burn Tool and choose a soft brush at 8px , the Range set to Midtones and Exposure reduced to 45%. Now, apply the tool across the base of the splash.

Step 19

Duplicate the “splash” layer and with the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl+T), right click to select Rotate 90 degrees CW .After which you right click again to select Flip Horizontal. Reduce the “splash” layer opacity to about 65%.With the Eraser Tool (E), Opacity at 40% fade the top part the splash shape.

Step 20

Create a new layer and pick the Rectangle Tool to draw a rectangle right below the splash shape. Add a Gradient Overlay style and edit the Gradient as shown below:

Step 21

Blur the edges of the rectangle by going to Filter > Blur > Guassian Blur. Set the Radius to about 35 px.

Step 22

Reduce the “flow” layer’s opacity to 90% and set the Blend Mode to Hard Light. Do the same for the “splash” layer except its opacity should be left unchanged. Also have this layer sharpened twice (Sharpen > Sharpen)to make the splash a little more ‘crisp’ to say the least.

B.

If you have the Bubbles Brush though I can’t recall right now if it with came preloaded with Photoshop or I downloaded it from somewhere. But a Soft Round Brush can still serve the same purpose. A new layer should be created for more intricate splashes and brush color set at #f7f7fa. Have both the “splashes” and “splash” layers sharpened.

.

Step 23

Though I intended the above image should be the final one, not being satisfied, I duplicated the “background” layer and change the Gradient Style to Radial. The colour of background (more importantly a dark one) determines the look of your water effect when the Blend Mode is set to Hard Light. Therefore, you can create different variation of your water effects.

Step 24

For more realism, I set the Blend Mode of both the “flow” and “splash” layers to Pin Light. For this gave the water effect more transparency. The duplicated “background” layer was hidden as well.

Step 25

Here the duplicated “background” layer was enabled and as a result the flowing water was given more visibility. I however ‘thirst’ to use these techniques to create more complex compositions or artworks involving human figures.

Step 26

For the final image, I used the free Transform Tool’s Distort Tool to make the flow of water narrower. Well, this is where the tutorial ends for now.

By David Ella Ella

Got a question about this article? – Ask it here!

For today’s news round-up we have a small collection of amazing text effects and tutorials for Photoshop.

3D Typewriter Text

In this tutorial you’ll create some 3d typewriter hammer keys in Illustrator and mix them together with some painting techniques and the Vanishing Point Filter in Photoshop to create a stylish multi-dimensional wallpaper.

View the tutorial.

Photoshop Grungy Metal Effect

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a text effect using textures from stock images. The final image is a grungy picture with text being illuminated in the dark.

View the tutorial.

Jungle 3D text in Photoshop

This is a hunourous Photoshop tutorial that explains how to create a 3D jungle text effect. You will firstly create the text in Xara3d and then Photoshop to texturize the letters using the animals’ skin.

View the tutorial.

Retro-Style Text Effect in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

For this tutorial you will learn how to create 3D text and merge it into a retro-style scene, using Illustrator for the text, Cinema4D to make the text 3D and finally Photoshop to bring it all together.

View the tutorial.

3D explosion using the Brush and Smudge Tool

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a 3D explosion using the Brush and Smudge Tool using Photoshop and its default settings. After creating the explosion, the tutorial also features a few steps guiding you on how to create and implement your own 3d text.

View the tutorial.

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

I must add that this tutorial would have been a lot more easier with the use of a graphic tablet (I’m saving for one myself). Nevertheless, everything is still very much workable with a mouse.

Before I started with the project, I decided to sketch out some mock-ups for the subject. I explored various postures and expressions of the possum and decided to stick with  seventh sketch. If you can’t draw, you may trace out the drawing by placing it underneath your working layer. I did relish reliving my cartoon drawing days.

Step 1

Create a new transparent document at 850 by 650 pixels and a resolution of about 200px. With the Pen Tool (P) selected, sketch out the outline of the face (not the head entirely) of our character. Before tracing out the face, make sure “paths” is highlighted on the Pen Tool Preset right below the menu bar.

Step 2

Fill the shape with the colour #a49e6e and then name the layer  if you wish, to “face.”  Use the Marquee Tool  (M) to select the whole area of the face and push delete on your keyboard to delete the outline.

Step 3

In a new layer, use the Pen Tool to trace out the body of the possum. Note that, we’ll not be drawing the body in full.

Step 4

Have the “face” layer unchecked so as to hide it when working with the layer below it. Fill the body withthe colour #7b5832. This layer will form the base for our fur coat.

Step 5

Now go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and increase the noise amount to about 30%. Also keep Uniforn selected and monochromatic checked.

Step 6

Select the Smudge Tool (R) and set its brush size to between 27px to 39 px depending on the size of the area you’re working on if you’re zoomed in. The strength of the Smudge brush should be set at 45%.

Your Smudge brush must be a Spatter brush.On the Brushes Palette, have Smoothing unchecked.

Step 7

Starting  from the head, apply the Smudge brush with short strokes.

Do endeavor not to make the flow of the fur go all in one direction. Our hairdressing skills might not be at par with that of Vidal Sassoons’s (whatever happened to him?) but we do try. When done, go to Sharpen > Sharpen to sharpen once. See the result below:

Step 8

Select the Burn Tool (O) as a Spatter Brush, the Range as Midtones and its Exposure at 10%.

Using the Burn Tool, darken the edges of the head and certain levels of the body.

Step 9

Select the Dodge Tool  (O) and set the parameters below:

Highlight the portions of the body most particularly in areas in between where burns were made. This would constitute something of bandings.

The resulting visual effects makes the fur look lush and glossy.

Step 10

Select a Soft Round Brush with its size set to 5 px, colour to #36282e and Opacity to 40%.

On the Brushes Palette settings, double click Shape Dynamics and enter the parameters below:

Step 11

Apply the brush over the fur coat in consonant with the direction they flow.

Also for a lighter shade, change the brush colour to #72582e. The changes might be just subtle but the little things does count.

Step 12

In a new layer, with the Pen Tool selected, draw both arms of the possum and fill with the colour #563f27.

This fill might be darker than the fur coat’s but we’ll of course darken in the course of this tutorial.

Step 13

Head on over to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set the Noise Amount to 25% and have Monochromatic checked. Use the Burn Tool to darken the edges of the arms as well.

Step 14

A Smudge Brush with Strength at 15% should be used for the arms. We don’t want the arms to be as hairy as the that of the fur coat. When halfway through the smudge, set the Smudge Mode from Normal to Darken. The result is depicted below.

Step 15

We’ll be applying a various shades to the face in a new layer, “facepaint” right above the “face” layer.

Select the brush colour as #5c4f3f and its Opacity at 12%.

B. Brush colour #63441d and Brush Opacity 10%.

C. Brush colour #e0c98b. Paint over the brow area, cheeks and nose areas.

D. Brush colour #fdf3d9. Paint the top part brows and the cheek areas.

E. Brush colour #f5eeda. Painting sould be made within the face for highlighting.

Step 16

To clear the overlapping brush paintings on the face, click the “facepaint” layer while holding down the ‘Alt’ button to create a Clipping Mask. Select the the Blur Tool (R) with its size at 17 px and Strength reduced to 33% to blend.

Step 17

With the Pen Tool yet again, draw the eyes and fill.. Don’t forget to clear the pen outline.

Step 18

For the “eyes” layer, apply  a Gradient Overlay Layer Style. Edit the Gradient  colours: 1. #949fb1 2. #a29f97 3. #ffffff.

Step 19

The Gradient Overlay Layer Style parameters:

Step 20

Name a new layer “pupils” and on the layer, draw two oblique shapes with the Ellipse Tool (U) amd fill with black. Add a white reflection of light with a Soft Round Brush to the pupils.

Step 21

Under the Pen Tool, select the Freeform Pen Tool to draw a rather tricky nose (for those with shaky hands).

But the Pen Tool can be use to accomplish the same feat only that with the Freeform Pen Tool you can add, delete and adjust anchor points on the shape. This ensures greater control and hence, smoother or rounded curves.

Step 22

Add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style to the “nose” layer. From the left, the Color Stops are:
1. #341302
2.#480c12
3. #b77363
4. #e7909e
5.#ffffff.

Step 23

Still on the nose, paint over its base and more particularly shape out a nostril with a black Soft Round brush with an opacity of 25%. Secondly, use the Blur Tool with a Strength of 45% for a blend and also add a Noise Amount of 5%.

Step 24

Select a Spatter Brush with an Opacity reduced to 25%. For the Brushes Palette, enter the parameters below:

Step 25

First off, the brush with colours #6e635e should be used to create the lines of the face and bearing in mind that the brush is faded, you’ll get swoosh-like lines as a result.

Step 26

Finally, paint with a brush with an appropriate size (depending on the area of the face you’re working on). The first colour of the Spatter brush should be #fcfaf9that would painted over the top half of the face.

The second brush colour: #24140b(a dark colour) should be painted around the areas of the eyes, below the nose, on the edges of the chin and a faint outline of the mouth made as well. When done, though the face may look messy now, blend your markings\paintings with the Blur Tool.

Step 27

For the “ear” layer, select the Pen Tool or Freeform Tool to draw an ear.

Step 28

Create a Gradient Over lay style for the ear. The Gradient Color Stops from the left: 1.#41291c
2.#54301c
3. #45858 4.#ffffff.

Step 29

Set the Gradient Angle to 93 degrees.

The final outcome:

Step 30

Over the ear layer, use a Soft Round Brush to paint the outlines of the ears and blend with a lower brush Strength after wards.

Step 31

Using a brush (colour: #eadccd)faded at 25% on the Brushes Palette, paint out long stripes of fur. Follow with a greyish brush colour (#a09485) that only be applied sparingly.

Step 32

Use the Smudge Tool with its size set to 7 px and Strength at 70% for the white fur markings.

Step 33

For the furs of the head, create dark strands of  fur with the brush colour #291f14.

Step 34

Now for the body areas, we’re going to shade these areas as we’re creating the possum in a poorly lit environment. Select a Soft Round brush with the colour #271d12and Opacity reduced to 75%. Do allow for the whites of certain strands of fur to show through in the shaded areas.

Step 35

With the same brush but at a lower opacity, shade  the face. Also make the the outlines of the mouth a little prominent; this time with the brush colour, #4a3e37.

Using another brush colour: #331f15, paint the near the edges of the chin. Blend with the Blur Tool with a strength of 15%. Click the fur “highlight” layer and merge with the other fur layers by pressing  Ctrl+E.

Step 36

We need a rough looking texture for a grudge background. This one’s called ‘deadcalm’ and it can be downloaded for free on graphicmania.net.

Step 37

Drag the texture into the document and resize to fit the current canvas size. He does look like a furlong figure in an abstract world of his own-pity.

Step 38

For a fading directional ligthing for the background, go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects and select Light type as Spotlight.

Now there’s a lot more atmosphere in the image.

Step 39

With the Freeform Pen Tool, sketch out a a tail and continue to adjust it until you get the desired shape. I got it right after more than several undos later.

Step 40

To add a shade to the tail, add an Inner Shadow style to it with the parameters below:

Step 41

Also darken the lower base of the tail.

Step 42

Merge the fur layer with that of the tail’s and you’ll notice that the fur coat automatically gets the Inner Shadow attribute of the “tail” layer. Everything all falls in place here. Also, duplicate this new layer and add a black Color Overlay Layer Style to it. Reduce its opacity to 65% and use the Move Tool (M) to position the “shadow layer” so-called, behind the possum.

Step 43

Select the Marquee Tool and draw the shape for a ray of light as shown below.

Step 44

For the Gradient of the “ray” layer, the Gradient Color Stops are:1.#bab1ab 2.#dad9d7 3.#ecebe3 4.#cfeae4 5.#ecebe3 6.#aaa19c 7.#ffffff.

For the Opacity Stops: 1.55% 2.55% 3.60%.

Step 45

With the Gradient Tool (G) selected, drag downwards within the Marquee selection.

Step 46

The light rays here, appears a little too prominent.To fade its edges, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and increase its Radius by 7.1 pixels.

We have here a more soft lighting  for the light ray.

Step 47

For a new layer to add a glow to the face, choose a white Soft Round brush. Highlight the edges of the face right from the nose and up to the brows.

You’ll get this ‘heavenly’ look of bliss below.

Step 48

Create a new Adjustment Layer by clicking it (the fourth icon from the left. Select Levels and enter the figures for Input Levels below:

The application of Levels for this image, is intended to add a shadefrom one end of the picture.

Step 49

I also applied a Soft Round brush on the edges of the head for a glow. There you go, its finished! Like any art piece to an artist, his artwork might never seem complete. You can throw in a halo to make the possum look a lot more saintly, candles or even add a cloud of smoke for added effect. These instances Ive mentioned, exploits the dark nature of the image and a result, there’s more gravity to it.

By David Ella Ella

Got a question about this article? – Ask it here!

In today’s news round-up we have five fresh tutorials that are both easily recognizable and certainly well designed.

How To Create a Detailed Apple iPad Icon in Photoshop

The Internet world exploded with the news of the Apple tablet launch last week. Named the iPad, it’s set to bring yet another revolution to the way people access and browse the web. An iPad icon would be a sensible addition to any web designer’s resources toolbox, so let’s fire up Photoshop and create our very own detailed iPad icon graphic.

How To Create a Detailed Apple iPad Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Shiny Paint Bucket Icon

Learn how to create a simple three-dimensional icon of a paint bucket, complete with paint splotches, with this colorful tutorial. Harnessing the power of paths, layer effects and consistent lighting you'll obtain an effective, shiny icon.

How to Create a Shiny Paint Bucket Icon

Design Monitor Icon in Photoshop Video Tutorial

Design Monitor Icon in Photoshop Video Tutorial

How to Make a Professional Buddy Icon in Photoshop

In this intermediate-level tutorial, you'll be shown how to make an awesome icon from scratch using Photoshop. You will need basic knowledge of Photoshop and familiarity with the Pen Tool (P).

How to Make a Professional Buddy Icon in Photoshop

How to Create a Photo Frame Social Icon Set in Illustrator Tutorial

In this Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to create a social bookmarking icon that is wrapped in a photo frame and might just be good enough to hang on your wall.

How to Create a Photo Frame Social Icon Set in Illustrator Tutorial

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Animation on websites has gone a long way, some time ago everything and anything that had movement on a website was automatically categorized as Flash, now we have these different technologies that have raised the standard and have broken the mold. One of these key technologies is jQuery, and with the powerful scripting language that it represents (JavaScript) you can do amazing things.

This trend of progress is more than heartwarming, it’s amazing, and this is why we’ve compiled a hand-picked list containing 20 Easy-to-Learn jQuery Animation Tutorials that are truly amazing! Have we missed any? If so, please share with us below.

Moving Boxes Carousel with jQuery

This is a simple jQuery tutorial will not throw a lot of source code your way. The carousel has features that allow you to zoom in and out. The boxes slide left or right.

Demo

Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery

The robot is comprised similarly to the background animation scene by layering several DIVs together to create the different robot pieces. The final step, was animating the robot with some jQuery.

Demo

Crafting an Animated Postcard With jQuery

Sam Dunn of Build Internet, wrote a tutorial on how to create an animated landscape using transparent images. The tutorial is based on the jQuery Easing plugin to aid the animation and the setTimeout() JavaScript function to time the events respectively.

Demo

Accessible Charts & Graphs from Table Elements using HTML 5 Canvas

This technique provides a simple method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from an HTML table, and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.

Demo

Animate a Hover With jQuery

Animate an image while hovering it and show the visitors information while doing that. Sounds simple huh? Well it is, but the effect is nice and can be nice for a portfolio, for example.

Demo

Puffing Smoke Effect in jQuery

This tutorial by Gaya Kessler features a beautiful animation effect of cartoonish smoke emanating from factory smoke stacks. You will be supplied a configurable jQuery plugin with instructions based on Gaya’s own site’s header, this way you can see the tutorial example first hand.

Demo

How To Create A “Mootools Homepage” Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery

The menu on MooTools is exceptional, and this tutorial covers how to create a similar one. It’s an amazing effect.

Demo

Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery

This tutorial, guides you in creating a sliding panel, that slides in to reveal more content, using JQuery to animate the height of the panel. You incorporate these features into your sites login area.

Demo

jQuery Infinite Carousel

This screencast explains how you can create a simple and nice scrolling carousel and how you can also make it automatically loop round by itself.

Demo

Create an Amazing Music Player Using Mouse Gestures & Hotkeys in jQuery

This tutorial helps you create an amazing music player coded in xHTML & jQuery that made use of mouse gestures and hotkeys. You can Click & Drag with mouse to interact with interface’s music player or use directional keys & spacebar instead of mouse.

Demo

Learning jQuery: Revealing Photo Slider

This revealing photo slider is great, it’s perfect for portfolios and photography sites. The entire structure of the slider is coded in JavaScript and CSS.

Demo

Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery

Drop downs are a dime a dozen these days and creating one that stands out is a bit hard. However, with this animated jQuery tutorial you will be guided on how to create one that works with jQuery. After you finish the tutorial you will know how to create your very own jQuery powered menu.

Demo

Multiple Animations with Glimmer

Glimmer is a JavaScript animation creation tool that lets you create amazing animations. By visiting the site you’ll be able to see a variety of examples with code.

Demo

How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery

This tutorial will allow you to enhance the functionality of content on your site using  jQuery and a bit of ajax so that the content loads into the relevant container instead of the user having to navigate to another page.

Demo

Create a Parallax Scrolling Background

In this tutorial, you will be  be using jQuery to take a horizontally scrolling website and add a parallax scrolling background effect reminiscent of old-school 2D platform games like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Demo

Create a Stunning Sliding Door Effect with jQuery

This tutorial includes detailed explanation that will guide you through the process of learning how to make a stunning four corners sliding effect easily with jQuery.

Demo

The youlove.us Scrolling Background Effect Explained

The technique is actually a lot simpler than it looks, it’s based around scrolling a very tall gradient image behind some transparent PNG images. The header image (with our logo, strapline and the laptop) has a transparent background and solid text, while the main page is actually an image with the heading text as transparent cut outs.

Demo

Make Your Header Responses To Mouse Movements with jParallax

jParallax turns a selected element into a window, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Demo

“Outside the Box” Navigation with jQuery

Just about every website uses the regular navigation concepts everyone’s used to. But since this can become boring to veiw, tutorials such as this one mimicking the OS X dock and stacks is the bi-product.

Demo

Re-Create the Leopard Desktop with jQuery

jQuery adds a whole lot of cool functionality to your websites. It can do a range of things, from animation to AJAX. With this tutorial you will learn how to use jQuery to create a completely coded Dashboard, just like Leopard! This can be handy in hiding widgets, links with icons, and more.

Demo

First off, open a transparent new document: 650 by 700 pixels. I have placed a white background temporarily which of course is to clearly show the shape drawn. From the Tools bar, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) with its rounded corner set at 32 px.

Step 2

Have your new shape filled with the colour #535255. Now double click the “zen” layer to bring up the Layer Style option. Choose Inner Shadow and enter the parameters below.

Now the dimensions of the Zen is beginning to take shape.

Step 3

Still under the same Layer Style, select the Inner Glow and click it’s gradient and select both Color Stop as #e5e8e9. Also, reduce the transparency of Opacity Stop on the upper right corner to 0%.

Step 4

Go to the menu and select Filter > Noise > Add Noise. In the dialog box, set the amount to about 1.67% and also make sure Monochromatic is checked. The Zen current state might appear unassuming for now but, with more adjustments it would steadily gain a solid realistic look.

Step 5

We are now going to add a matt reflection of light for the Zen.For the purpose of illustration, I have outline the area this reflection should cover. In a new layer, select a Rounded Rectangle Tool (U) and draw a rectangle as shown below. Apply a Gradient Overlay Layer Style to the rectangle with the gradient colour as #dedde5 and its Opacity Stop reduced to 68%. On the menu, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and increased blur Radius to 35.4 px.

Proceed to have the outline of the rectangle cleared by encircling it with the Marquee Tool (M) and then pressing the delete key.

Step 6

For accuracy, I’ve decided to employ the use of grids as my guidelines by selecting View > Show > Grids on the menu.You may however use rulers if you prefer, by pressing Ctrl+R and dragging the lines of the rulers into position. Now create a new layer and select the Rectangular Tool (M) once again. Choose a 1 px rounded corner for your rectangle and draw a screen for the Zen.

Step 7

If your foreground colour is black, press Crtl+Backspace to fill the shape. Double click the “screen” layer for a Layer Style and select Gradient Overlay and edit the gradient colour with the right Color Stop set as #323233.

Step 8

The Gradient Angle should be placed at 130 and the Gradient Scale increase to 120%.

Step 9

Duplicate the “screen” layer by right clicking it and selecting Duplicate Layer. Name this new copy “screen bevel” and apply a Color Overlay Layer Style to it. It’s colour should be #e8e9eb and its opacity reduced to 25%. That done, with your keyboard’s arrow key move the screen bevel to the right only just slightly.

Step 10

Create a new layer and and select the Rectangle Tool (U) and draw an ‘active’ screen within the screen bevel (name the layer “screen2″). Fill the new shape and choose the Gradient Overlay style for it. When editing the gradient colour, adding from the left, colours of the stops should be as follows #330715, #7f041e, #941019, #f89af2, #fae3f9. That done, check Reverse and from the drop-down list of the Gradient type, select  Radial and Scale to 145%.

Step 11

Right on top of the screen create a new layer, select the rectangle Tool (U) to draw a set of squares. Where for every square drawn, right click and select Fill Path > Color.

Square colours:1.#a47380  2.#a47380  3.#cd728a  4.#e3d4d8  5 #f7f5f6  6.#f2d7de  7. #e7d2d6  8. #ebe7e8  9.#c06f82  10.#c3a7ad 11.#d4c0c5  12 #d7c8cb  13.#f9d5de (*note:don’t forget to clear the outline of each square after it has been filled before proceeding to the next square).

Step 12

Duplicate the “screen2″ layer and reduce it’s opacity to 50% and then place it above the “squares” layer.

Step 13

Now add a new layer for one of the five bars that will be drawn. Select the Rectangle Tool, then fill and add a Gradient Overlay style to it. On the Layers Palette, the “bar 1″ layer’s opacity should be lowered to about to 30%.

Step 14

For other bars to follow, below are the colours of their gradients. For “bar 2″ and “bar 5″, check the Reverse box.

Step 15

There must be a thin gap between “Bar 5″ and “Bar 4″. When done, go to the Layers Palette and reduce the bars’ opacities: bar 2 – 30%; bar 3 – 30%; bar 4 – 40%; bar 5 – 55%.

Step 16

Select the horizontal Type Tool (T) and on the menu, go to Window > Character to bring up the Type Tool Presets for more options.

Create a new folder “text” for your text group. Do this by clicking on the fifth icon from the left right below the Layers Palette. This is for better organization and not making the layers in the palette painstakingly too long as the folder is collapsible. Name your text layers and arrange them accordingly as shown below.

Text colour for “menu” and “music” layers are #d6ced4. For other text layers, colour should set to #e7e4e6.

Step 17

We’ll attempt to draw a music note (a beamed note)now. In new layer select the Ellipse Tool (E) and sketch out two not-so-rounded circles and then fill.(*note: Do not clear the outline of the circles just yet).

Step 18

Add a Bevel and Emboss style to the circles.

Step 19

Still working on the note, create a new layer and on the Tools bar, select the Rectangle Tool to draw a
horizontal line and have it tilted at an angle selecting Edit > Free Transform > Distort. Follow it up with two vertical lines.

Step 20

Yet again, add a Bevel and Emboss style.

Place this layer behind the layer with the circles.

Step 21

For the battery icon, draw a small rectangle and apply a Gradient Overlay Layer Style to it.

Increase the Gradient Overlay’s Opacity to a 100%.

The battery icon here, is aligned with the “menu” text.

Step 22

For the tip of the battery, draw a small vertical rectangle on the right side of the battery icon and fill with a white colour.

Step 23

Create a new layer and select the Rectangle Tool and draw a horizontal line across the width of the Zen. Fill this thin rectangle bar with black and add an Inner Glow Layer Style to it with it. For the glow’s colour, set it to #e9eaed and reduced the upper-right Opacity Stop to 0%.

Make the adjustments below:

By right right clicking the “Line” layer, duplicate this layer three times.

Step 24

On the Layers Palette, click on “create new group” for the buttons of the Zen and name it “Buttons”. For a new “button1″ layer, pick the Rounded Rectangle Tool to draw a square button.

The Color Overlay Layer Style colour; #a5d1d8.

The parameters for the Inner Shadow style:

For Stroke style enter the parameters below with the Stroke Color as #1d1d1e.

Go to Filter > Add Noise and set it’s amount to 5.55% and have Monochromatic checked as well. Then blur only just slightly (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur).

Step 25

Duplicate the “button 1″ layer twice.

Step 26

With the Move tool (V) selected, arrange the two button copies. For the button on the second row, change it’s Stroke style colour to #e3e3ea(*note: the button’s former black Stroke colour would still remain).

Step 27

Create another layer for another button and name it “button 2″. With a square drawn as the same size as the previous button, fill with colour; #2e3e41 and add Noise; 1px .Add a Bevel and Emboss style as below:

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the Radius to 0.2 px. Also, reduce the “button 2″ opacity to 68%.

Step 28

Duplicate “button 2″ and arrange in the order below:

Step 29

For another button, draw a square and fill with colour; #535255. Add a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style.

Step 30

Duplicate “button 3″ layer two times.

Step 31

Create a new layer for the centre button – “button 4″. Fill the button with a white colour and for a Layer Style select Bevel and Emboss:

Step 32

Under Bevel and Emboss style, click Contour an select contour type as Cove-Deep. Also select Stroke and choose a black colour for it and set the size to 1 px.

Step 33

Click on Inner Glow and set the glow colour to #e9eaed and enter these parameters:

Go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and set the amount to 5.54% with monochromatic checked as well.

Step 34

Create a “button 5″ layer and add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style. Edit the gradient colour. From the left: 1. #2e3e41 2. #37494c3. #2c3a3d 4. #798b91 5. #2b3a3f 6. #161819.

When done entering the parameters below, on the Layers Palette reduce the “button 5″ layer’s opacity to 50%.

Step 35

Duplicate the “button 5″ layer and postion it right below the original.

Step 36

Name the layer where the next square to be drawn (with rounded corners of 1 px), “button 6″.

Step 37

Set the colours of the stops:

On the Layers Palette, reduce “button 6″ opacity to 95%.

Step 38

For a new “button 7″ layer, add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style:

Reduce the “button 7″ layer’s opacity to 85%.

Step 39

For “button 8″ layer, the Layer Style for the Gradient Overlay:

Step 40

For the Inner Glow Layer Style for “button 8″, set it’s colour to #e5e8e9 and fade it’s gradient opacity to 0%.

The “button 8″ layer’s opacity itself should be reduced to about 60%.

Step 41

A new layer should be named “button 9″ with the parameters of Gradient Overlay and Inner Glow styles shown below:

Reduce the “button 9″ layer opacity to 60%

Step 42

On the Tools Palette, select the Custom Shape Tool and go to it’s menu and and select the Polygon Tool. Set it’s sizes to three for a triangle and then draw this triangle for the “Button 1″ layer.

Step 43

For the sign “Up” colour: #2e3e41 and the Bevel and Emboss style:

Step 44

Place the triangle “up navi. sign” on the “button 1″.

Step 45

Duplicate the “up navi. sign” layer and go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 90 degrees CCW. This “left navi. sign” layer should be placed above “button 2″.

Step 46

In a new layer, draw another triangle and fill it with the colour #c5d1d8 and enter the following parameters for its Bevel and Emboss style:

Step 47

Under Bevel and Emboss style, select Contour and select Cove-Shallow. Reduce the layer’s opacity to 85%.

Step 48

Have the layer duplicated twice and position these signs on “Button 4″, “Button 5″, and “Button 6″. Also rotate the signs accordingly as shown below by going to Edit > Transform > Rotate.

Step 49

For the next sign – “Play/Pause”, draw a triangle and two vertical standing rectangles. Fill these shapes with the colour #3d3e40.

Step 50

For the “Play/Pause” sign, the parameters of Bevel an Emboss style should be as follows:

Step 51

Contour type set be Cove – Shallow.

The result:

Step 52

For a new layer, use the Rounded Rectangle Tool set at 1 px to draw the shape below. A triangle had been added as well.

The colour to use; #474b4a.

Step 53

The “Sign 4″ Bevel and Emboss style paramters:

Step 54

The Contour type; Cove – Shallow.

Step 55

With the Line Tool (U), draw four vertical black lines and add an Outer Glow Layer Style to these lines.

Step 56

With the Pen Tool (P), draw a short curve (spear-like) over a triangle that’s facing downwards. Fill the shape(s) with colour #48494a.

Step 57

Parameters for the Bevel and emboss Style:

Step 58

Contour type; Cove – Shallow.

Step 59

Now for the Zen logo, select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and have the Type Presets displayed (Go to Window>Character on the menu).

Step 60

Select the text type as Arial Rounded MT Bold and it’s fill colour as #868d96. Type the letters “ZEN”.

Step 61

Add a Gradient Overlay Graident Style to the text. Here, the first Opacity Stop from the left should be set at 40% and the second, set at 0%.

Step 62

For an emboss look for the base of the screen, draw a rounded rectangle at 2 px and fill with the colour #cdced1.

Step 63

Set it’s Blend Mode to Soft Light and reduce the opacity to 45%.

Step 64

For a scroll bar, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool with rounded corners of  2 px.. The Color overlay; #7d8183 and Opacity; 86%.

The Bevel and Emboss style parameters:

Step 65

Create a new layer for the background and draw a large square. You may use the Gradient Tool (G) or add a Gradient Overlay Layer Style.

Step 66

For the shadow casted by the Zen, draw a rounded rectangle with corners set at 1 px.

Step 67

Go to menu and click on Edit > Transform > Distort to shape the rectangle from both
sides.

Step 68

Adding a Gradient Overlay Layer Style to the “shadow” layer, edit the gradient as shown below:

Step 69

In another layer named “reflection”, draw a Rounded Rectangle with rounded corners set at 2 px.

By David Ella Ella

In today’s news round-up we have collected ten of the best and freshest Illustrator tutorials to do just that, learn something new and maybe help inspire you for your next art project.

Cafe Style Coffee Art in Adobe Illustrator

In this Illustrator tutorial, the author will explain how he created the "Delicious Coffee" illustration which was published in "1000 Restaurant, bar & café graphics" by Rockport Publishing.

Cafe Style Coffee Art in Adobe Illustrator

How to Make Super-Sharp, Vector Swords

In this tutorial you'll be shown to draw a sword in Illustrator, using the Rectangle Tool, gradients, and other Illustrator tools.

How to Make Super-Sharp, Vector Swords

How To Create A Slick IPod Icon Using Illustrator

This is a great little illustrator tutorial form Creative Nerds, which shows you how to create an iPod icon using Illustrator.

How To Create A Slick IPod Icon Using Illustrator

Create An Editable Metal Type Treatment in Illustrator

This tutorial is pretty similar to the Letterpress Font and Sketchy Font tutorials in that it uses the Appearance panel to create a type treatment that is fully editable when it is done.

Create An Editable Metal Type Treatment in Illustrator

Create a student character mascot with Adobe Illustrator

This is an intermediate Illustrator tutorial level where you can learn how to create a vector student character mascot from a sketch in Adobe Illustrator. The techniques can easily be applied to other character design, illustrations or icons.

Create a student character mascot with Adobe Illustrator

Create an Illustration of a Pearl-Filled Clam on an Ocean Bed

In this tutorial, you'll create a shell with pearls in a unique ocean scene, using various effects, such as: mesh, blend, warp, clipping mask, opacity mask, depth of sharpness, editing of swatches, and pathfinder box.

Create an Illustration of a Pearl-Filled Clam on an Ocean Bed

Free Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

In this tut you can learn hot to take advantage of Illustrator’s live effects and create a 3D pie chart to represent your data.

Free Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Creating a Surrealistic Hand-Drawn Illustration

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a surrealistic illustration using fine liners, marker, an economic all in one printer, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Creating a Surrealistic Hand-Drawn Illustration

How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

In this Adobe Illustrator tutorial you will learn how to design a cute bear character and surrounding scenery in just two colours, ready for use as a cool t-shirt design.

How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Step ₁

We’ll create a new transparent canvass of 800 by 800 pixels. From the Tools bar, select the Pen Tool (P) and sketch out the head of our animated ‘hero’ as shown below. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

(*note: select Paths from the Pen Tool’s menu bar)

Step ₂

By right clicking the drawn shape, select Fill Path and the colour; #6c4f32 to fill the shape and name this layer “head”. To point out, for every shape drawn in this tutorial, we’ll be using the Marquee Tool (M) to clear its outline after a fill’s been applied. For example, select the whole shape with the Marquee Tool(whatever suitable shape as of the time) and press the delete key. Then press Ctrl+D to deselect the shape.

Step ₃

Create a new layer by clicking the “New Layers” icon below the Layers Palette. Name this layer “body”. Next, select the Ellipse Tool (U) and draw a tummy in an oval shape. With the Pen Tool, sketch out the arms and legs each with its own layer.You may name these layers “arm1″, “arm2″, “leg1″ and “leg2.”

Step ₄

Right click each of these sketches and fill with the colour, #6c4f32.

This is the order the layers are arranged:

Step ₅

We are now going to add a texture to all five layers.Go to Filter > Texturizer and in the dialog window, select the texture Burlap with Scaling at 103% and Relief at 3.

Step ₆

Like Ive said, apply this texture to the arms and legs of the character.This is the result. Rather flat it may seem for now.

Step ₇

I however felt that “arm1″ was a little ‘disjointed’ for me. Hit Ctrl+T for Free Transform, right click and select Distort and adjust by from the corners as shown below. But this step could be avoided by drawing this arm perfectly from the start.

Step ₈

Select the “head” layer and bring up the Layer Style menu by double clicking the layer. For the Bevel and Emboss style, enter the following:

This would add a directional light to the head of the subject.

Step ₉

For the “leg1″ layer, add an Inner Shadow Layer Style with it’s Angle at 207, Distance at 20px, Size at 13px and Noise at 31%. More importantly, have the Global Light unchecked first before making these adjustments.

Step ₁₀

Select the “Leg2″ layer and add an Inner Shadow Layer Style. Of course with Global Light unchecked first, the Inner Shadow’s angle placed at -149, Distance at15px, Size at 21px and Noise at 25%.

Step ₁₁

For your “body” layer, the Inner Shadow Layer Style parameter would look like this:

Step ₁₂

The “arm2″ Inner Shadow Layer Style:

Step ₁₃

The “arm1″ Inner Shadow Layer Style:

Step ₁₄

Select the “head” layer and duplicate it by right clicking it and choosing the Duplicate Layer option to do so. Then go on ahead to add a new Layer Style for it as shown below:

Now we’re giving the figure a little more dimension.

Step ₁₅

In a new layer, draw with the Line Tool or (any prefered tool of choice), a mouth at the lower base of the head.

Step ₁₆

For another layer, draw two straight eyebrows and apply a Drop Shadow Layer Style to it.

Step ₁₇

For the eyes, in a new layer, draw two round shapes right below the eyebrows making it intersects at points of each brow. Note that the right eye should be a lot more rounded and left eyes a little more
stretched in appearance. By pressing Crtl+T and right clicking to select Warp, have the eyes positioned as shown below.You can see that the left eye has a slight tilt upwards and the right eye is fairly bent at an angle towards the left.

Step ₁₈

Have the “mouth”, “eyebrows” and “eyes” layers selected accordingly and merge with the “head” layer. Go to Layer > Merge Down or simply hit Ctrl + E to do so.That done, Select Edit > Transform > Warp and only just slightly adjust the handles of the warp and the end result would be a head with a a more 3D look.

Step ₁₉

In a new layer, select a soft brush at a size of 3px.With closely dotted application of the brush to the eyes, have the brush concentrated on the upper part of the eyes.

Step ₂₀

Create a new layer and select the a Splatter brush – 24px and a black foreground colour. Delicately paint the face as shown below. There however are two methods you can use to clear the areas the brush overlaps. First, you can use the Eraser Tool (E) or select the layer while holding down the ALT key. Do this when done painting.

Step ₂₁

Proceed to paint parts of the arms, body and legs.

Step ₂₂

Still with the Splatter brush, change the brush colour to #d9bf9b. Across our subject’s forehead, draw a near-crooked slanted line with the brush and also use the brush to trace out the bulge over the eyes for an angry look.Continue to apply the brush around the eyes and line that forms the mouth.

Step ₂₃

Still with the same brush, paint over the portions encircled below, you may paint round other parts of the figure until you satisfied the figure is appropriately highlighted towards the direction of light

The final outcome.

Step ₂₄

Add a new layer for the zipper, select the Rectangle Tool and draw intersecting rows of rectangles in the shapes of ‘Ys’. Fill the these shapes with a white colour and deselect afterwards (when their outlines have been cleared). Hit Ctrl+T and right click to select the Warp option. Bend slightly the zipper to the right.

Step ₂₅

Now apply a Layer Style to the zipper.With the Bevel and Emboss’s Depth at a 100%, size at 3px and no Soften.

The zipper embossed:

Step ₂₆

With the Ellipse Tool, draw an oval circle at the top of the zipper and use the Layer Style below:

Step ₂₇

Choose the Rounded Rectangle Tool with a rounded corners at 2 px. Draw over the circle and use the same Layer Style as the zipper’s. With a follow up, draw a handle in a something of a quadrilateral and apply a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style to it.

Step ₂₈

There you have it.

Step ₂₉

Being a “Sackboy”, the neck should appear roughen at its end.

Step ₃₀

Add an Outer Glow style to the roughened neck and set the colour of the glow as #a58553 and it’s gradient reduced to an opacity of about 30%.

Do a follow up of this for the joints of the hips as well.

Step ₃₁

Drag the “ground” texture to your workspace and resize as appropriate.This texture is credited to www.mega-tex.nl.

Step ₃₂

Use a Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to scale the “ground” texture for the ground surface.

Step ₃₃

In a new layer, draw a square that would serve as your sky and next, select the Gradient Tool (G). On the Gradient menu, choose a Radial Gradient and check Reverse. Edit the Gradient adding the following colours below. That done, draw your Gradient from above the head of ‘Sackboy’ to just below his left-hand side.This would be something like a diagonal line.

Step ₃₄

Select the “ground” layer and apply a Gradient Overlay to it via Layer Style.

Don’t forget to reduce the Gradient’s opacity to about 35% and have it’s Scale set to 70%.

Step ₃₅

We’re going to going to paint a shadow beneath the character with a Splatter brush in a new layer. The Blend Mode of the brush should be set to Soft Light and shadow should have its edges with a lot less details.

Step ₃₆

Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select the upper edge of the ground texture and have it feathered at 5px.

The result would give the ground something like a horizon.

Step ₃₇

Create a new layer and then go to Filter > Render >Clouds. Desaturate the “clouds” layer by pressing Shift+Ctrl+U.

Step ₃₈

Still on the “clouds” layer, go to Image >Adjustments >Brightness/Contrast. Increase the contrast of the Clouds to +50.

Step ₃₉

On the Layers Palette, set the Fill  Opacity of the “sky” layer to about 50%. Note that this layer should be above the “clouds” layer.

Step ₄₀

Create a “clouds2″ layer, select the Brush Tool and choose the Odysee brush by Axeraider70 from Deviantart. Set the brush size to 626px and its Blend Mode to
Soft Light and make the first brush strokes more pronounced. and the couple that follows quite faint.

Step ₄₁

From the Tools bar, pick the Smudge Tool (R) and with swipes, stretch both ends of the cloud outwards and at certain points inwards.

Step ₄₂

Pick the Blur tool (R) and use it to fade the edges of the cloud most particularly at its base in other for it to blend properly against the blue sky. When done, merge (Ctrl+E) the “sky” layer with the “clouds2″ layer.

Step ₄₃

Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare and drag the flare to the upper right part of the preview window and the len’s midpoint around the middle of the preview window.

Step ₄₄

With the Eraser Tool (E) as a Splatter brush, trim off bits of the wavy neck on both ends.

.

Step ₄₅

With the Splatter brush yet again, choose it’s colour as #ecf3f8. I have to point out that, this colour has a faint bluish tint to it.

Step ₄₆

Use the Burn Tool (O) and apply over the bottom part of the zipper to conform with the gradation of light.

Step ₄₇

For the distant hills (in a new layer), select a square brush (if available) or a round brush will do just fine. Use for the brush colour; #a9a087 first and then followed by a colour; #51504d. Reduce the opacity of the “hills’ layer to 50%.

Step ₄₈

Voila! It’s alive!!! Well, in the graphic point of view.

By David Ella Ella

Here is a collection of 35 Premium Photoshop Layout Tutorials for Web that teach you how to create your very own layouts. Enjoy!

Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch

This tutorial will enable you with the tools to put together a high-end web design layout using clean and beautiful images, as well as well nested elements.

Photographer Design Layout

A simple Photoshop tutorial on how to create a nicely illustrated professional photographer web layout.

Website Gallery Layout Design

This tutorial will help you learn how to make a layout for a css website gallery utilizing Photoshop.

Design Studio Layout

Here you’ll be showed how to create a simple web design portfolio layout. You can also use this layout to create your very own wordpress theme.

Design a Premium Wordpress Blog with Photoshop

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a premium wordpress layout with a special area where you can feature products, apps, or downloads.

Corporate WordPress Style Layout

Create a dark, clean, and usable blog style layout tailored for your corporate needs. Using WordPress, you will also have a section for your blog, which is a great way to reach prospective clients.

Making the “Clean Grunge” Blog Design

With this tutorial you’ll be able to see how to make a clean/grungy layout.

Clean Website Layout

Learn how to create a clean and simple web layout using Photoshop.

Five Looks, One Layout

Learn the swift process of creating a diverse web layout that can embody various design themes.

Watercolored Background Web Portfolio Design

In this step by step tutorial you’ll be explained how to create a Watercolored Background Web Portfolio Design using two brush sets, a icon pack and some basic techniques.

Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout

This tutorial shows you how to create a clean corporate layout in Photoshop.

Develop a Unique Colorful Site Layout

This tutorial will guide you through the process of designing a professional website with a funky colorful flair. The tutorial features some great colors, effects and layer styles in which you can use over and over for future projects.

Create a Nature Inspired Painted Background in Photoshop

We’ve all seen it, and we’ve dreamed of experiementing with backgrounds featuring nature. This tut lets you do just that, and more.

Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch

Throughout this tutorial, several tiny details and features will be pointed out, they will make your website design look beautiful.

Create a Company/Business Web Layout Using Photoshop

Create a light psd template well fit for a company website layout, business photoshop template, and a portfolio layout.

Create a Clean and Effective Product Layout

This tutorial will show you how to create a clean and effective product design in Photoshop. This template can also be easily converted into a portfolio layout if desired.

Create a Business PSD Layout in Less Than 10 Minutes

Here you’ll develop a crisp business layout in less than 10 minutes.

Create a Green/Eco-Friendly/Environmental Web Layout

You will create a green/eco-friendly/environmental web layout (photoshop template).

Design a Sleek and Modern Hosting Layout

This layout features dark elements with bright text and cool buttons. It’s got a slightly futuristic feeling to it as well.

Create a Nature Inspired WordPress Layout

In this Photoshop tutorial you will create a nature inspired WordPress layout with a number of features such as Free Social Media Icons, a Function Icon Set, and Nature photos.

Web Site Design Tutorial: Wellknown.as Case

This tutorial shows you how the author created the layout using Fireworks. But of course you can do the same thing in Photoshop, the commands will change a bit but the process is practically the same.

How to Create a Sleek and Textured Web Layout in Photoshop

In this Photoshop web design tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a full web page layout that combines the sleek and textured look-and-feel using a combination of beginning to intermediate Adobe Photoshop techniques.

How to Create an Illustrative Web Design in Photoshop

In this web design tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a professional web design with an illustrated “vector” header in Photoshop. You’ll see many techniques here including how to draw using the Pen Tool and a excellent type treatment using layer styles.

Design a Clean and Fresh Company Website in Photoshop

You will be shown how to create a clean and sort of serious web design for a company.

Create an Amazing Layout Using Textures

In this tutorial you will be shown how to create an amazing layout using a simple texture, and some layer styles.

Design an Attractive One-Page Portfolio in Photoshop

You will be designing a one-page portfolio in Photoshop. The portfolio will include some brief biographical information, some sample work, brief description of services, your latest tweets, links to social profiles, and a call to action.

Create a Professional Portfolio Design in 17 Easy Steps

This tutorial teaches you how to create a professional looking portfolio design using very basic techniques.

Design a Simple, Modern Web Template

In this tutorial we will create a beautiful modern web page design with great usability.

Create a Gritty Website Layout

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a clean website layout with a grunge background. You can use this layout for a Wordpress blog as well.

Create a Clean Modern Website Design in Photoshop

Build a complete website design mockup for a fictional design studio, starting with the creation of the initial layout then moving on to designing the individual page elements. The result is a modern, crisp and clean webpage layout ready for coding.

Create A Stylish Portfolio Layout

In this tutorial you will be shown how to painlessly create a stylish portfolio layout in Photoshop, and you will also be guided on how to add jQuery functionality.

Create a Web Design Company Layout in Photoshop

Here you will learn how to create a modern looking Photoshop design for your web design company.

Create a Promotional iPhone App Site

In this tutorial you will be creating an iPhone app promotional site by taking our previous Fireworks constructed wireframe and adding color, texture, images, and effects to polish off this design in Photoshop.

Shopping Cart Design Mockup

You’ll be mocking up a shopping cart design layout called shop smart with various useful elements and extra functions.

Design a Dark, Contrasted Layout in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a dark, contrasted layout in Photoshop. This technique makes the top of the layout stand out while the bottom has a dark, professional feel.

Converting Your PSD to HTML Resources

This tutorial guides you through the entire process of converting from Photoshop to completed HTML. You’re going to build out a set of 4 PSD mockups of a website that eventually will become a WordPress theme.

Tutorial: Coding a Layout

This is a tutorial from Eratic Wisdom, it does a good job of looking at the process quickly. If you’re interested in going through a shorter tutorial on the subject rather than spending a large chuck of time on all the details, try this one.

Build a Sleek Portfolio Site from Scratch

Within this tutorial you will be taking a good look at PSD files and then learning how to build it with some nice clean HTML and CSS.

From PSD to CSS/HTML in Easy Steps

This is the first in our 4 part series on how to take a PSD file and convert it into a fully CSS based html page. These are the first in a series of tutorials in which we build a fully working Photography site, all in clean Xhtml and CSS.

How to Turn Your Designs Into Usable Web Interfaces

Part Digital Design offers a detailed tutorial for coding a site from a Photoshop file. This tutorial is very detailed, from slicing the interface to the coding.

What we have done today is put together a collection of the best Photoshop resources from this year (2009), There are tutorials for image manipulations, text effects, icon design, digital imagery, illustration… and much, much more. Accompanied with all of this, there are also huge collections of PS actions and textures.

The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials 2009

In order to save your time, Photoshop Lady has been spending almost a whole year searching for the best photoshop tutorials for you. They have come up with The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials of 2009, selected from there published tutorials, with over 1 million votes and views from there Photoshop users and readers.

The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials 2009

The 30 best Photoshop tutorials of 2009 – Computer Arts

Whether you're after advanced advice on font trickery or you hanker for detailed guides on photo manipulation, you're sure to find something here to help you while away those long winter nights and boost your Photoshop know-how in the process.

The 30 best Photoshop tutorials of 2009 – Computer Arts

The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009

In the resource you will find The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009, a collection of diverse and unique effects and type treatments that will add a little extra to your next design.

The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009

45+ Truly Stunning Digital Painting Tutorials

The author of this article have listed 45+ Truly Stunning Digital Painting Tutorials for those designers out there who wants to try this type of art. Read through the tutorials in this post and gain useful tips to master the technique… Have fun!

45+ Truly Stunning Digital Painting Tutorials

200+ Very Useful Free Photoshop Actions

In this article Tripwire magazine has a very large collection of Photoshop actions (some in large bundles). With the click of a button an action can help you achieve time consuming effects in no time, you just need to have access to the right actions.

200+ Very Useful Free Photoshop Actions

25 New Photoshop Action Sets for Photographers and Designers

This time, the Photoshop actions are for Photographers, with an impressive collection of 25 actions, this post is worth bookmarking.

25 New Photoshop Action Sets for Photographers and Designers

26 Photoshop Illustration Tutorials

This style of designing is mainly achieved using Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw to get that vector-like effect, but for those who do not have vector graphics editor, orsimply prefer Photoshop, this is a nice selection for you.

26 Photoshop Illustration Tutorials

45 Useful Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials for Christmas Season

The holiday spirit is once again here. Santas, Christmas trees and Christmas balls are once again in fashion…and just for that Naldz Graphics have collected 45 Useful Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials for Christmas Season.

45 Useful Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials for Christmas Season

The Best Free Texture Packs of 2009

There are a few things that a designer can not have enough of in his or her design arsenal, and one of them is textures. Since there were so many textures released in 2009, it must have been difficult to choose the best. However, this post does a damn good job with this collection, and most will be valuable additions to your texture library.

The Best Free Texture Packs of 2009

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

So, you have this amazing WordPress site, but for some reason the search engines just don’t show you much love. You post killer content, make it easy for users to share via their social networks, and people are subscribing to your RSS feed, indicating that they’re like what they’re reading. If you’ve tried everything to drive traffic to your website, and search engines still ignore your site, maybe you need to evaluate how search engine friendly your website is.
Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

How To Fully Secure Your Wordpress Blog

The author of this posts website, Creativeoverflow, was hacked last Friday morning (11/12/2009), and decided to write this article to help you protect yourself from being hacked or anything in that line.
How To Fully Secure Your Wordpress Blog

A Comparison of 6 Popular WordPress Frameworks

Being that most of us are working against multiple deadlines at one time, we need to be able to save ourselves as much time and headache as possible, and help prevent ourselves from unnecessarily re-inventing the wheel. That is why frameworks are such a time and life saver in the development arena.
A Comparison of 6 Popular WordPress Frameworks

Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers: Reloaded

This article presents the second part of the article, view part 1 here, this part covers customizing basic content administration and adding features to the post and page editor in WordPress.

Many template developers have learned the art of making beautiful, highly customized front end templates for WordPress. But the real wizards know how to tailor the WordPress administrative console to create a tailored, customized experience for content managers.
Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers: Reloaded

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

1: Define Your Page Element

> Open a new Photoshop file to page requirements (72 dpi for web, 33dpi for print)
> Create a new layer and name it ‘Page’ (or a name of your choosing)
> Using the rectactangle selction tool – draw the page you want to apply the effect to

2: Apply a Drop Shadow to the Page

> Layers (from the main menu) > Layer Style > Drop Shadow

The settings used for this tutorial are; Distance=”4px”, Spread=”0px”, Size=”16px”. You can adjust these drop shadow settings to be appropriate with the particular type of image you want to emphasise; a poster, a postcard, an old sheet of paper etc.

Basically you need to imagine the natural 3D quality of the physical object and recreate it. A new sheet of paper would have very little 3D quality when layed flat so you wouldn’t need more than 16px in size, but an old photo may have heavily curved corners for example – in which case you would increase the size of the shadow. Here we are aiming for something in between.

The more you increase the distance of your shadow – the more you can control the direction of light to your page.

3: Flatten and Rasterize the Page Layer

> Right-click and convert your rectangle into a ‘Smart Object’
> Right-click again and ‘Rasterize’ your new Smart Object

4: Start Cropping the Shadow

> Take the Spherical Select tool from your tools panel and draw yourself an extreme oval
> Place the bottom edge of this oval at the top edge of your page
> Hit the Delete/Backspace button to crop your 1st curve into the drop shadow

What you may find is that for darker or larger shadows – the crop looks to clinical and precise to be natural. The cure for this is to add a Feather effect to the Spherical Select Tool before you carry out the crop. The Feather setting is found at the top of your workspace window, below the main menu. The darker and more dramatic the shadow – the more you will need to increase this value.

Once you have cropped the top of the shadow do the same with the bottom. The distance that you applied to the shadow in the settings box will actually do most of the work for you in terms of simulating natural light direction.

Once both the top and bottom edges are cropped we have a more natural looking drop shadow than is possible with the standard Photoshop effect. The image now looks 3 dimentional without appearing to hover in mid-air. See below …

You may want to add some more depth to the image. To do this, apply the same cropping technique to both the left and right sides of the page as well.

Now you have the a more natural effect to plant your nice image or content on to. Here I have used a photo I took in Barcelona.

Now the finished image has a natural quality all of it’s own and now sits ON the page rather than hovering above it.!

*This is a taster of things to come. Help us to deliver the things you want to see by leaving constructive feedback and requests for future Photoshop tips!!

By Lee Mason, a freelance graphic / web designer based in Norwich.

I have started with Helvetica (a sans-serif font) here because it’s very easy to work with (especially in caps) as all the latters are pretty much the same width, it’s also very bold. There may be times when this wide letterspacing works for you but with a logo you should always try less spacing as a general rule.

Bringing letters closer together helps to turn the word into more of an image. Reducing the spacing has also made the word much stronger – which is great when you are working with brand identity design. The letterspacing reduction above is extreme but sometimes it might need to be. Overall, less letter spacing works best for most logo designs.

[Illustrator: Window / Character] – For changing the letter spacing.

Now we have swapped Helvetica for Bembo to display how a serif font reacts to the same reduced letter spacing. Immediately you are probably drawn to the centre between the O and the G, after this you notice how tiny the L looks when compared with the other letters. This is to do with the weight, width and shape of one letter in relation to the next. In this case we need to look closer at the spacing of each individual letter.

What you are aiming for is an equal space around the main body of each letter. This doesn’t mean that each letter has a 2mm gap to the right, as your serifs (the bits that stick out) effect how we can actually use our space. Notice that the gap between the G and the last O is wider than the other gaps, and yet the letter G is still touching the letter O. It’s about finding the happy medium. I have also increased the line spacing between the L and the first O, by giving the letter more space it has become stronger and balances much better with the rest of the logo.

This typeface is Bickamp Pro – one of the most commonly used fonts, alongside Helvetica and Bembo. Notice that the letters are joined up, this is going to cause us problems when we alter the letter spacing as the letters won’t join up correctly.

With a line space reduction of -50 you can see that all of the joins are out of alignment and although the effect does have quite a nice grungy feel about – it won’t work for one of your more classier clients. So the question is … “How do we change the letter spacing without ruining the typeface”?

My solution is to use a seperate layer for each letter in your logo, all letter spacing from this point on will be done by eye – which is fine. Now that the letters are seperated some of the joins are missing, and some have changed.

This is a rough attempt but you can see that we have eliminated the alignment issue. To take this appraoch further and get exactly the right effect you would need to rasterize the type and turn it into an image – which will be covered in my next tutorial… ‘Type as an Image’

Step 1

First off, load this picture of the Peoguet Parna. It was downloaded from rocketdock.com. You can also download more free car images from getcarwallpapers.com. The actual size of this picture is 841 by 595 px and so this will be the dimensions we’ll work with in our tutorial.

Step 2

Now select the Pen Tool (P) and trace out the car along with the ground itself. Select the the Layer Mask button (the third button from the left, right below the  Layers Palette) to make a layer Mask.

Step 3

On the menu bar and select Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and set the Hue to -147 and the saturation to -80.

The end result is a light bluish tint on the car.

Step 4

Open the “drought” texture that will be used for the background. You can get more textures such as these for free at www.megatex.nl. This texture came from the texture pack they supplied to my 2005 cover disk for Computer Arts. Adjust the image size to the appropriate size that would fit the current workspace and then used Shift+Ctrll+U to desaturate the texture.

Step 5

Now drag the texture over to the car image making sure the texture layer appears below the car layer.

Step 6

Make a copy of the Mask layer  and name it “car copy.”

Step 7

Selecting the “car copy2″ layer, reduce the brightness of the car by -10 and increase the contrast by 5.

Step 8

Select the texture layer and  reduce the brightness by -60 and increasing the contrast by 10.

The result would look like this:

Step 9

Proceed to add a lowly lit background for the texture layer “bg texture” by selecting; Filter>Render> Ligthening Effects and choosing the light type as Spotlight.

It turns out like this:

Step 10

This might seem like a step overdone, but still go on ahead to Filter>Render> Lightening Effects and select the light type as Omni. Lighten up the  already lit background. This is to create a subtle gradation of light.

Step 11

Yet again, darken the background texture  with the brightness at -10 and the contrast at 10.

Step 12

Select the “car layer” and darken it by  reducing the brightness by  -20 and the increasing the contrast by 5.

Step 13

Select the Brush Tool (B) from the Tools Panel, setting the brush property at Soft Light and the Opacity at 90%.

Now go to the Brushes Palette. If you don’t have this enabled, just hit “F5″ or go to  Window> Brushes. On the Brush Presets, click on Texture and select the Granite texture. Also, check Invert and scale the texture to about 107%.

Step 14

Still on the Brush Presets, click on the Dual Brush  Preset  and then pick Splatter (27 px) with the mode set to Darken. Other settings  under the Presets are; spacing:6%, Scatter: 512% and Count:1.

Here’s the result when the brush is applied with simple clicks or taps (as in my case with a laptop).Donot applied the brush with swipes or the splattering effect  wouldn’t show through.

Step 15

Select the Burn tool (O) and choose the Range as Shadows.

Step 16

Use the Burn tool to darken the edges of where the Splatter brush was used.

Step 17

Also use the Burn Tool to darken the top edges of the car that appear to have a whitish outline.

Step 18

Select the Blur Tool or click on (R).Set the brush size to 31px and strength to about 70%.

Step 19

With a swipe or two, use the Blur tool to blur the light reflection that runs from the bonnet of the car and across the windshield (windscreen that is). This is to make the edges of the refleciton of light looking  to sharp in this dark composition. Also apply a blur below the right hand corner of the picture.

Step 20

Apply a Color Layer Fill to the image by going to the Layers Palettes, selecting the fourth icon from the left .Then selecting  Solid Color (#515355). That done, set the Blend Mode for the Color Fill Layer to Soft Light.

Step 21

To project the car as being blended with the background as against “sticking out.” Double click the first car layer to enable the Layer Style options. Apply a Drop Shadow effect with the Blend Mode set to Multiply; Opacity at 85; Angle at -40; Distance at 16px; Size at 15.

There we have it, a “bat mobile” inspired Peoguet Prana!

By David Ella Ella

2. PSD Learning

3. Photoshop Lab

4. PS Wish

5. Photoshop User TV

6. Planet Photoshop

7. PSD Core

8. Photoshop Essentials

9. Good Tutorials

10. Photoshop CS Tutorials

11. Photoshop Guides

12. Adobe TV

13. Tutorial Park

14. Pixel2Life

15. Tutorialized

16. Adobe Video Workshop

17. Spoono

18. Photoshop Videos

19. Revision3 PixelPerfect

20. Tutorial Blog

21. Photoshop Tutorials on Vimeo

22. Tut Factory

23. Instructables Photoshop articles

24. Computer Arts

25. Layers Magazine

About the author: Mirko Humbert is a freelance designer from Switzerland. He shares his thoughts about his passion on his design blog. To connect with Mirko, you can follow him on Twitter.

Coding Clean and Semantic Templates

If you are the guy who uses <div> tag for everything, this post is for you. It focuses on how you can write clean HTML code by using semantic markups and minimize the use of <div> tag. Have you ever edited someone’s templates, don’t those messy tags drive you crazy? Not only writing clean templates can benefit yourself, but your team as well. It will save you time when you have to debug and edit (particularly the large projects).

Coding Clean and Semantic Templates

Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources

Buttons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style buttons, including to make them more attractive and to enhance usability. One of the most important reasons, though, is that standard buttons can easily be missed by users because they often look similar to elements in their operating system. In this post they have several techniques and tutorials to help you learn how to style buttons using CSS.

Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources

CSS Box Model: The Foundation For Improving Your CSS

The CSS box model lies behind everything you do in CSS. Every element is defined by a rectangular box that encloses that element. Understanding how the box model works is a key to understanding CSS and having greater control over your layout and presentation. In this article they talk about what the CSS box model is, how one box affects the other boxes around it, and some common browser issues when displaying CSS boxes.

CSS Box Model: The Foundation For Improving Your CSS

What Beautiful HTML Looks Like

What Beautiful HTML Looks Like

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

2. Photoshop Lady

3. Tutorial9

4. Photoshop Roadmap

5. Photoshop Tutorials

6. PSD Vault

7. Photoshop Star

8. PSDVibe

9. PsDeluxe

10. Grafpedia

11. PS Hero

12. 10Steps.sg

13. PSD Burn

14. Abduzeedo

15. Photoshop Tutorials Blog

16. My Photoshop Tutorials

17. Creative Overflow

18. Luxa

19. Photoshop Support

20. Total Tutorials

21. Photoshop 101

22. GoMediaZine

23. Tutorial Wiz

24. Tutorial Lounge

25. Tutorial Sphere

About the author: Mirko Humbert is a freelance designer from Switzerland. He shares his thoughts about his passion on his design blog. To connect with Mirko, you can follow him on Twitter.

We will be working with the ‘fruit smile’ image that is available for download here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/95516793/sizes/l/

A quick preview of the different types of affects you can achieve with adjustment layers:

Open the image in photoshop and in the bottom of the layers palette click on the adjustment layer icon. This should bring up a menu of different types of adjustment layers. All the options that are available under image > adjustments are available to us in adjustment layers. You can also make new adjustment layers by going to layer > New adjustment layer.

As we create different types of adjustment layers we will be turning the visibility off by clicking on the eye icon to the left of the layer. You can use adjustment layers individually or combine them to create compound effects.

Levels

You can use the Levels dialog box to correct the tonal range and color balance of an image by adjusting intensity levels of image shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Curves

The Curves dialog box or Levels dialog box to adjusts the entire tonal range of an image. Ive changed the red channel just a bit to make the photo look a bit more vintage.

Color Balance

Our original photo looks like it has a slight orange cast to it so we will correct this by using the color balance adjustment layer. I have change the settings to remove the red and increase the blue. This should combat the orange tint.

Brightness and Contrast

Our photo looks a bit dark so lets turn off the previous adjustment layer and create a new one. Select Brightness and contrast and bump up the brightness a bit and contrast. This makes the photo appear that it was taken on a sunny day.

Black and White

Using the black and white adjustment layer allows you to add tints to your photos.

Hue / Saturation

The hue/saturation adjustment layer allows you to target specific colors and change them. Lets say that we want to make the yellows in the photo a bit more orange. Select yellow from the dropdown menu and change the hue slider. Notice that this changes the colors of the apples and banana.

Channel Mixer

The channel mixer adjustment layer allows you to create a black and white image from your color image, with far more options than going to  image>grayscale. Tinker around with this adjustment layer until you achieve a nice result.

Gradient Map

The gradient map adjustment layers can add subtle or not so subtle color effects to your photos.

Photo Filter

The photo filter adjustment layer has several different options. I have selecte the warming filter. Notice that it takes out some of the blue in the photo and adds some orange. The cooling filter does the opposite – it adds more blue and takes out the orange. The warming filter also makes a great sepiatone affects for black and white photos.

Posterize

The Posterize adjustment layer flattens the colors in the image and allows you to set a number of levels of colors to allow. This filter gives the photo a sort of illustrated effect.

Download the PSD (ZIP)

What do you think?

Want to know how to do something in Photoshop? Have a question? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Tutorial written by  Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog and Daily Design Bits.  Follow Niki (@nikibrown) on twitter!

40+ CodeIgniter Framework Tutorials for Kick-Ass PHP Application

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework – a toolkit – for people who build web sites using PHP. Here is the list of 40+ Excellent And Useful CodeIgniter Application Development Framework Tutorials & Resources that includes some useful tutorials and a few great resources that has been developed for programmer and designers.

40+ CodeIgniter Framework Tutorials for Kick-Ass PHP Application

25 New & Useful PHP Techniques & Tutorials

Finding new and useful PHP techniques can be difficult, in this great resource they have collected 25 tips, tricks, tutorials and of course, techniques.

25 New & Useful PHP Techniques & Tutorials

10 great Alternatives to phpMyAdmin

Most people in the web development world are under the impression that phpMyAdmin is the only MySQL client out there for websites. There are others, many more. The author of this post has listed and describes in detail 10great Alternatives to phpMyAdmin.

10 great Alternatives to phpMyAdmin

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

44 Really Useful and New Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

In this great Illustrator tutorial round-up there is a list of 44 fresh and relatively new tuts. Following these basic step by step tutorials will help you to easily learn the Illustrator environment and help how to recreate the amazing effects and illustration techniques from each tut.

44 Really Useful and New Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

18 Impressive Tutorials on Creating Vector Illustrations

In this article, you will find a good number of high quality lessons by the best and most talented graphic design artists on the many ways to creating effective vector illustrations.

18 Impressive Tutorials on Creating Vector Illustrations

Top Places to Find Quality Illustrator Tutorials Online

Finding Illustrator tutorials online can be a mission, but luckily there’s a hand of websites and blogs offering top class Illustrator tutorials, tips and techniques. This post rounds up the best places online to find high quality tutorials and articles to help you learn Illustrator like a pro.

Top Places to Find Quality Illustrator Tutorials Online

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

How to Create Inset Typography

Shiny Calligraphy

Create a Fun Illustrated Toy Site Design

Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design

Add Fantastic Color to 3D Text

How to Create a Severed Arm

Graph Design Wallpaper

PSDRockstar.com » Floral Text Wallpaper

Create a Quick Vampire Scene

Typographic Portrait like Grammy's Posters

Learn How To Create An Amazing Car Illustration

Creating a Typographic Wallpaper

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Download the example photoshop file we will be working with: Slices.psd.zip

Using the slice tool

First lets talk about the slice tool. The keyboard shortcut for this tool is ‘K’. Select the slice tool and draw a selection around the type in the middle of the header. When you draw a selection with the slice tool photoshop automatically creates slices around the slice that you draw.

You can select individual slices by using the slice select tool. Click and hold on the slice tool in the tools palette and a pop up menu should appear.

Right clicking on slices with the slice select tool gives you several options:

Slice options include renaming, linking and adding alt text. This is used when converting slices to a table based layout. Wich I dont recomend for a nything but e-newsletters.

Aother handy feature is the divide slice option. No more worrying about getting everything evenly spaced of lined up!

Now that we have learned about some of the options and how to use the slice tool I’m going to show you a super quick and easy way to create slices.

Creating Slices from Guides

Guides in Photoshop can be easily created by clicking in the ruler space to the top and left of the document and dragging a guide onto the document. If you don’t see the rulers go to view>rulers or Apple+R.

Drag your guides to the appropriate places. In this design we are going to slice the design into 6 pieces – so we drag guides to separate the text on the bottom and to separate the red area from the black area.

Next click on the slices tool in the tools pallet.

With the slide tool selected click on slices from guides.

Photoshop crates 6 slices based on the location of your guides. When saving the guides photoshop will number them accordingly with the number and file name.

Go to file>Save for web and save the document as a .gif file. (Not a jpeg like pictured… oops!)

Photoshop saves the images with their corresponding number into a folder in the directly you specified.

Saving Single or Multiple Slices

To save a single slice, or a few selected slices click the select slice tool and click on a slice. The border around the slice should turn from blue to gold. To select multiple slices hold down shift while clicking the other slices.

To save multiple slices go to file>save for web. Select .gif. In the bottom Saved Optimized as box is a dropdown menu that says Slices. Select the selected slices option. This saves out the slices that you selected. If you choose all user slices Photoshop will save only the slices that you drew with the slice tool.

What do you think?

Leave a comment and let us know if you have any questions or if you have any subjects you would like to see covered in this Photoshop 101 series!

Tutorial written by Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog and Daily Design Bits. Follow Niki (@nikibrown) on twitter!

Plan your animation

In this animation I’ll be using some text and an image of bananas. I’ll be making the bananas move on and off the screen, tweening (creating transitions between frames) and changing the positioning and color.

The Animation Palette and creating frames

Create a new document in Photoshop and open the animation palette by going to window>animation.

The animation palette has two views: Frame view and time line view. You can click on the icon on the bottom right (highlighted in pink) to toggle the views. We will be working on frame view today.

Create your images on separate layers. Animation is created by moving your images around to different positions in each frame.

Frame length

You an also change the time length each frame displays.

Creating a Tween

Create a new frame. Turn the banana text layer off and turn the banana image layer on.

Next create a new frame again. Click on the 2nd frame and move the bananas to the left of the screen so they are not visable.

Select the 2nd and 3rd frame and click the tween icon:

A pop-up box will then appear asking you how many frames to tween and what parameters to include. We have only changed the position of the bananas, but you can also use Photoshop effects, and opacity as well.

After the tween photoshop ads the frames to your animation. Click the play button to preview your animation.

Saving For Web

When you are all done go to file>Save for web and save it as a .gif file. Piece of cake!

So go ahead and go nuts! Be creative and spice up your animation. I spent just a few more minutes and created this ballet of bananas:

Download the PSD (ZIP)

What do you think?

Want to know how to do something in Photoshop? Have a question? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Tutorial written by  Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog and Daily Design Bits.  Follow Niki (@nikibrown) on twitter!

In this post you will find 50 vector cartoon characters tutorials using Adobe Illustrator, each tut author takes you through there own individual cartoon character design process, teaching you new techniques in the process.

Create a Character Mascot

Create a Cute Furry Vector Monster

Create A Vector Art Twitter Bird Character

OWL DiNG Tutorial

Illustrate a LeBron James Cartoon Character

Cartoon Bug Tutorial

Create a Cartoon Character with Expressive Lines

Create your own Leprechaun

Create a Super Happy Octopus Character

Vector-Looking Cat Illustration

Creating vector characters in Illustrator

Drawing and Designing a Lovely Cartoon Character

How to Add Fur to Vector Animal Illustrations

Create a Stinking Zombie Flesh-Eater

The Making of Abe

Create a Vector Pirate Cartoon Character

Blue Vector Character from Pencil Sketch to Coloring

Vectorial illustration with Illustrator

Symmetrical Illustration: Thug Bunny

Circle Vector Tutorial

Turn a Sketch into a Fat Cat Vector

Create a Killer Chainsaw Bunny Character

Create a Cute Bunny Vector Character

Maintaining Rhythm and Flow in Vector Character Design

Drawing a character’s face in Illustrator

Character Illustration

Primitive Art Man Cartoon

Drawing a Fish in Illustrator Tutorial

Illustrate a Cute Emo Kid

How To Create Your Own Vector Cartoon Character

Create a Gang of Vector Ninjas

Make a Cartoon Turtle

Cartoon Monkey

How to Draw a Cartoon Duck

How to Draw an Amazing Vector Twitter Bird

Create a Cute Bird

Create a Simple Vector Creature

How to Create a Cute Hippo Character

Monster Character Series Part 1

Monster Character Series Part 2

Monster Character Series Part 3

Monster Character Series Part 4

Creating Line Drawings in Adobe Illustrator

Drawing a Funny Game Character

Character Illustration Wallpaper

Creating Convincing Characters

Twitterlove Bird

A Cow As Chinese New Year Zodiac For 2009

Fantasy Character

Drawing Kirby

By Paul Andrew from Speckyboy Design Magazine, you can follow him on Twitter

Today we will be working with this lovely image of a chihuahua with a mohawk from iStockphoto:

Saving a selection in an alpha channel

1 Select the area that you want to remove via the pen tool, marquee tool or magic wand.

2 Go to select>save selection. Select new channel from the pop up and name the channel

Head over to your channel palette and click on the new alpha channel ‘dog’.

You can then utilize the alpha channel for later selections by command clicking on the channel thumbnail image.

Transparent Highlights

1 Go into the chanel pallete and select the blue chanel. CMD Click the chanel thumbnail and then go to select>inverse of shift+cmd+I. This selects the dark areas of the blue channel.

2 Lets head back over the the layers palette and make a new layer over the original layer. Fill this selection with black

3 Make the original image layer invisible and add a gradient layer under the black highlight and go wild – add gradients, colors or any effects. The black highlight really pops on a pink background. Then add some text and you can call yourself a graphic designer!

Since the black hilight is transparent its really easy to change the background color to create a different effect.

Download the PSD (ZIP) file here.

What do you think?

Want to know how to do something in Photoshop? Have a question? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Tutorial written by  Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog and Daily Design Bits.  Follow Niki (@nikibrown) on twitter!

First: The basics

Step 1: Draw A square with the rectangle tool (u)

Step 2: Select Edit>Free Transform Path (or Command+T)

You should see little handles on the corners and the middle of the sides of the square.

Step 3: Grab one of the handles and drag it from the square

Go ahead and experiment. Adding keyboard shortcuts while using the transform tool is being used really unleashes its power.

Free Transform Tool + Keyboard Shortcuts

Grabbing a handle and dragging alters the shape. Holding down shift while dragging a handle preserves the aspect ratio of the shape.

Holding down option when dragging moves the sides equal distances from the center reference point.

Hovering your mouse over a corner reference point allows you to rotate the shape. Holding down shift while rotating snaps the shape to 45 degree angles from the original position.

Holding down Option+Command allows you to move both sides equally from the reference point and vertically as well – allowing you to skew the object.

Holding down Shift+Option+command allows you to add perspective to an object.

You can also achieve similar distortions with the specific transform tools which do the same thing. These tools can be found under the Edit>Transform menu. One tool that is notable and worth pointing out is the warp transform tool.

Warp Transform Tool

This tool ads a grid over the shape and allows you to distort and warp specific points of the shape.

Now that we have the basics down lets do something cool!

I did a search over at iStockphoto for ‘blank billboard’ and found this photo:

We’ll also be using my favorite banana image again!

Cut out the bananas in the shape of the blank billboard area.

Place your type over the billboard and then right click and convert to shape. This allows us to preserve the quality of the vector image while distorting.

This may take some time, but with some small fineagling with the perspective and skew tools you can get the type to look just right. Then add some outer glow behind the type to make it pop whiz bang!

Download the PSD (Zip) File here

Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Tutorial written by  Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog. Follow me (@nikibrown) on twitter!

Step 1: Find an image with some interesting texture.

I’m going to go with a grass background. Download the image here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nebrow/3736422961/sizes/o/

Step 2: Add text to the image

Open the image in Photoshop and use the type tool and type some text on top of the image.

Step 3: Drag the text below the grass layer

Step 4 Create the clipping mask

With the grass layer selected go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask. The keyboard shortcut for this on a mac is Option+Apple+G.

And there we have it! Masked text! Now lets take this one step further by adding some detail and changing the color of the grass.

Step 5 Add a drop shadow

Add some nice shadow to the text by right clicking on the layer effects icon and adding a drop shadow.

Step 6: Add More Grass

Next lets duplicate the grass layer and drag it below the text layer.

Step 7: Change the color of the grass

With the top grass layer selected go to Image>Adjustments>Hue Saturation. The keyboard shortcut for this is Apple+U on a mac. I chose to make my grass purple in this case.

And there we have it… Purple grass!

Download the PSD

Simple Clipping Mask PSD (ZIP)

By Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog. Follow me (@nikibrown) on twitter!

Lets consider what masks do: They hide or show things. Masks in photoshop work the same way: they can hide or show parts of images. In general filling a layer mask with black hides a part of the image. Filling a layer mask with white shows a part of an image. Filling the mask with gray will show the part of the image with varying opacity based on how light or dar the gray is.

Step 1: Select two photos that you want to combine and place them in your Photoshop document.

I just selected two random photos that I found on the internet for the purposes of this tutorial.

Photo 1: A giant wall of bananas:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/myszka/2241313997/

Photo 2: A nice comfy living room setting:

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1208339

Make sure the banana photo is below the living room photo:

Step 2: Select the living room photo in the layers palette and click on the mask icon at the bottom.

(if you cant see it go to view>Layers) This creates the layer mask. You should notice a white box next to your layer with a little link.

Step 3: Select the couch area of photo 2 using your selection tool of choice.

This is the area of the photo we are going to hide. After this area is selected

Step 4 With the banana layer selected fill the couch area with black.

Filling the mask with black tells Photoshop to hide this part of the photo. The banana background should now show through.

Your image should now look like this:

With a few simple tweaks you can show the texture of the wall and the shadows by setting the blending mode of the banana layer to soft light.

Such lovely wallpaper.

Download the PSD

Simple Layer Mask PSD (zip)

By Niki Brown – author of The Design O’Blog. Follow me (@nikibrown) on twitter!

The basics

WordPress themes are the standard layout system that define your blog’s appearance. It consists of template files, functions, template tags and images. To install a WordPress theme, you just need to upload it and activate it in your WordPress admin.

WordPress page structure

Most of the time, a WordPress page is composed of the header, the sidebar, the content and the footer. These structural elements usually are separated files that you can include in your template files. There can be more structure elements, such as other sidebars, advertising space or whatever you can think of.

Template files

The above chart shows what files are used depending on the page you are using. You can use only the index.php with a stylesheet, but you would be missing customization options that make your theme more user-friendly.

The Loop

In WordPress, the loop is a set of functions used to display your posts and everything related to the posts (title, tags, author, categories,…). To customize the loop, WordPress has some well documented pages that you’ll find here or here. For a more advanced loop use like multiple loops on the front page, some blogs offer very extensive tutorials about it.

Template Tags

Template tags are small PHP snippets that are used to display info on the blog. For example, <?php bloginfo(‘url’) ?> will display the base url of your blog. Wordpress has a very good documentation about template tags and lists the tags available. When using WordPress plugins, you’ll sometimes get plugin specific template tags.

Functions

The functions.php file is a special one, it will not display a specific page but contains all functions used for your template. For example, you will need it to create widget zones or to create a theme customization page in WordPress’ admin.

Twitter background guidelines

Technical information regarding the file dimensions for a Twitter background, its positioning and some recommended tools.

How to brand yourself with a Twitter background

Introduction to Twitter branding by Calvin Lee of Mayhem Studios. Good advice on the type of Twitter background to chose, tiled image or not.

How to design the perfect Twitter background

An overview of various types of Twitter background, good read to make the right decision about how you will design your own background.

How to make a Twitter background picture

Step by step tutorial to create your Twitter background image with Photoshop.

Twitter Background using Adobe Illustrator

Video tutorial teaching you how to create your Twitter background using the popular vector drawing software.

Create a Twitter background using PowerPoint

For people with no Photoshop skills, this tutorial will explain you how to create your own Twitter background using PowerPoint. Some templates are provided in the article.

Create a Twitter background with Photoshop

Excellent video tutorial with in-depth explanations on how to create a Twitter background with Photoshop.

How to turn a texture into a seamlessly tiled background

Create your Twitter tiled background by editing a texture image with Photoshop.

Twitter background design how-to and best practices

Perhaps the most complete article about the creation of Twitter backgrounds.

High-quality Twitter backgrounds

A collection of free Twitter backgrounds for the people who are too lazy to create their own background.

Peekr

Peekr is a great website to view the entire background image of any Twitter user, very useful to get inspired by other people’s backgrounds.

Twitterbacks

A Flickr gallery of great Twitter extended backgrounds free to use.

1′000+ background patterns you can use for free

For the lazy ones, this website will offer you more than a thousand free patterns to chose from.

About the author: Mirko Humbert is a freelance designer from Switzerland. He shares his thoughts about his passion on his design blog. To connect with Mirko, you can follow him on Twitter.

How to make a Photoshop Brush

A simple and detailed tutorial, giving you great tips and a step-by-step guide to creating a PS brush.

Creating Custom Brushes

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create your own brush preset so that you can easily replicate shapes and/or patterns.

How to make a brush and how to use it

Photoshop brushes are maybe the best ways to stylize your picture, you work. There are many settings that you can use to create different beautiful effects. Moreover you can make a brush from almost every picture, every pattern, out of anything. So in this tutorial you will be shown how to make a brush and how to use your newly made brush.

Creating Photoshop Brushes from a Photograph

This tutorial will show some basics on how to create a Photoshop brush from a photograph or a scanned image.

Feather Brush Tutorial

Leaf Brush Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will explore how a custom brush can be used to make realistic leafy foliage.

Beelzebub Brush Tutorial

In this tut you will creating two brushes, one is a cement face and the other is an image of Beelzebub.

Coffee Stains and Splatters Brush Tutorial

The grunge theme has no rules, this gives the designer a lot of freedom. Here, you will learn how to create coffee stain and splatter brushes that can be used again and again in your designs.

Lego Bricks Brush Tutorial

Learn how to create PS brushes out of a rendered image of lego bricks

Grunge Brush Tutorial

Textured Brush Tutorial

Texture and grunge brushes are great resources to have if you want to add an ageing effect to your work. And making your own set gives your design it’s own unique style.

Abstract Brush Tutorial

Create your very own abstract PS brush.

Dew Drops Brush Tutorial

Rose Brushes Tutorial

Brush Creation for Beginners

Making Brushes – AZ Forums

Fractal Brush Tutorial

Photoshop Brushes Tutorial

Custom Brushes and Brush Dynamics

In this video, you will learn how to create custom brushes and how Brush Dynamics work.

Create Custom Brushes in Photoshop

Photoshop Tutorial: Make your own brushes

Making Photoshop brushes from scratch

Hopefully, after all these, you will now be that little bit more familiar with Photoshop Brushes.

To help, we have compiled a list of the most sought after Photoshop textures tutorials, not only useful as resources, but, also good means to learn new skills.

Realistic Grass Texture

Glass Texture

Leather Texture

Honey Texture

Red Slate Texture

Rust Texture

Brick Texture

Leather Type Texture

Flower Texture

Wood Texture

Realistic Stone Texture

Metal Texture

Leopard Skin

Alabaster Texture

Dry Wall

Wood Texture

Asphalt Texture

Wave Texture

Lava Texture

Plaid Texture

Brushed Aluminum Texture

Grungy Metal Texture

Rust Texture

Rock and Stone Textures

Dirty Screen Texture

Jeans Textures

Stone Texture

Dots Texture

Fence Texture

Technodots Texture

Wood Texture

Liquid Blood Texture

Wrinkled Paper

Gold Texture

Marble Textures

Desert Texture

Water Texture

Dragon, Snake and Reptile Scales

Grungy Paper Texture

Military Style Texture

Preview

This is a preview of the final effect.

Step 1

Open this image as is and double click on “background” layer to make it editable, rename the layer to “girl” then adjust Levels and auto adjust Curves to lighten the image a little bit.

Step 2

Extract the girl from the black background, and add a new Fill layer below “girl” layer.

Step 3

Paste this picture by hotblack as a background into a new layer named “forest”, go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All and using the Gradient Tool, paint a Radial Gradient White – Black on the layer mask.

Step 4

Create a new layer above all the other, name it “Light” and fill it with a Reflected Gradient White – Black and adjust the curves as shows the image below to add more light stripes. Distort the layer using Transform options and Command (Ctrl) + Click on the corners. Then change layer’s Blend Mode to Saturation, and Opacity to 45%.

Step 5

Select “Girl” layer, then using the Lasso tool, select an irregular shape over girl’s face. Copy the selection and paste it into a new layer named “Face”.

Step 6

Select “Girl” layer once more, then using the Lasso select the entire body, take special care on the neck, make the selection rounded there, you can follow the necklace shape to make it right. Copy and paste the selection into a new layer named “Body”.

Step 7

Duplicate “Girl” layer and hide the original. Select “Girl copy” and using the Burn Tool darken girls’ neck, chin and cheek.

Step 8

Select “Girl” layer once more, select and copy a little piece of forehead, hair and ear. Copy and paste it above “Face” layer.

Step 9

Next, select “Body” layer and select a section of the arm and cut it. Hiding “Girl copy” layer you’ll see how it looks. Then make visible “Girl copy” once more, and using the burn tool darken some areas of “Girl copy” layer. Repeat this process as many times as you want in several places.

Step 10

Download this image by henry_azui, select a long piece of chrome metal and copy it. Paste it into a new layer between “Body” and “Girl copy” layer, Feel free to transform the bars to make them match your design.

Step 11

Select a bended piece of metal, Rotate it, Warp it and place it as a robotic mandible. Remember, put this metallic piece between “Body” and “Girl copy” layers.

Step 12

Duplicate the previous metallic part. Adjust the Lightness on Hue / Saturation window to make it darker. Transform it and place it as the right side of the mandible.

Step 13

Select and copy a little engine’s piece. Paste it, resize the shape and place it somewhere over the mandible.

Step 14

Paste the previous metal piece again, warp it as you want to place it as the girl’s chest.

Step 15

Continue adding metal, this time select a thin piece and paste it twice as shown in the image below.

Step 16

Add more metal on the chest.

Step 17

And so on, you can add as many metal as you desire, everywhere.

Step 18

Next, grab this picture of some colored wires, extract them from the white background and place it above “Metal” layers (I put all the metal in a folder by the way) and below “Body” layer. Put as many copies of the wires as you want.

Step 19

Select “Girl copy” layer, select the dark part behind the metal and wires and delete that selection.

Step 20

Select the clone tool and a tiny brush. Select “Body” layer and clone some skin areas over the knees, chest and dress to increase the cut out illusion.

Step 21

Use the dodge tool to create a peeled border effect.

Step 22

Create a new layer below “Body” layer and using a big soft black Brush, paint some shadows to increase the deep sensation.

Step 23

Merge all the layers, or put all the layers into a folder, name it “Image” duplicate it and merge it. Duplicate the copy and Blur it a little bit, then apply a Radial Gradient Layer Mask to the blurred copy.

Step 24

To increase the dramatic effect, add a Gradient Map adjustment layer (#0F2344 – #A2B5F0). Change its Blend Mode to Overlay and opacity to 55%.

Conclusion

Finally add further details, I’m adding a fibers texture on top, some text and a spark. Is up to you now!

Downloads

Photoshop PSD files

Talented Designers Wanted!

We are always on the look out for talented designers willing to share their work (icons, wordpress themes, photoshop actions) or write design tutorials. By contributing to DesignReviver you’ll be financially rewarded and will gain exposure to a large audience. For more information about contributing please contact us.

If you enjoyed this tutorial please share it:

When the title says Image Map, It doesn’t mean basic image replacement, and when It says Pure CSS, It doesn’t mean CSS blended with javascript or ajax (which of course there are solutions), its CSS and only CSS. Lets make this perfect.

CSS Image Maps, Redux (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : CSS Image Maps, Redux.

This CSS Image technique makes use of the Sliding Doors technique combined with a definition list. The sliding doors technique allows you to contain all your image rollover effects in one image file, and make use of the background-position CSS property to “shift” the image in any direction. By adding a :hover effect to your CSS, you can shift the image to a desired position.

CSS Image Maps With Pop-Up Tool Tips (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : CSS Image Maps With Pop-Up Tool Tips.

Using an unordered list, a couple of images, and a little CSS, you can create an accessible “image map” with pop-up tool tips that will provide your readers with more information on the links the map contains. Unlike some image maps, the one outlined here has the advantage of working in older versions of Internet Explorer.

How do I… Use CSS to create an image map on my Web site? (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : How do I… Use CSS to create an image map on my Web site?.

While Image maps are still considered valid HTML, you can use this CSS method to separate content from presentation. It also has the advantage of using less code for more complex image maps, and is good practice for knowing when to declare IDs rather than Classes in your CSS code.

Creating an Image Map using CSS only (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : Creating an Image Map using CSS only.

With this tutorial you will be shown how to turn an ordinary Definition List into an Image Map, using nothing more than CSS that should work in all modern browsers. In this tut you will be walked through the styling one step at a time, fully explaining the reason for each style and showing the results of each step.

Night of the Image Map (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : Night of the Image Map.

This tutorial dates back to 2003, don’t be put off by this, the depth and detail that the author gives will be helpful to anyone that wants to learn, understand and organize CSS.
In this tutorial you will use CSS to create invisible links and float them over the background image.

CSS Image Rollover Map (Tutorial)

Tutorial URL : CSS Image Rollover Map.

This tutorial is fairly advanced, roll your sleeves up and dig in. This map, including mouse over national flags, is constructed with one image and positioning on hover controlled with a css file.

Experiment with CSS Image Rollover Map (Technique )

URL : Experiment with CSS Image Rollover Map.

An image map of Europe, when you hover over each country the national flag will show.

Experiment with CSS Image Rollover Map (Technique )

URL : Experiment with CSS Image Rollover Map.

Hover your mouse over the image to reveal three areas of interest. Then hover over each area to reveal an enlarged detail with text.

Return of the Image Maps (Technique )

URL : Return of the Image Maps.

With this technique the image map that has pop up speech bubbles of various sizes with pointers on all four side. The speech bubbles also contain a short piece of text and links to further information on the web.

A Scrolling Image Map (technique )

URL : A Scrolling Image Map.

This is a horizontally scrolling image that has ten hotspots indicated by a white rectangle. Just click on any of these hotspots to see a larger image to the right and a small piece of information in the left hand corner of the scrolling image.

By Paul Andrew

Tutorial 1:
Combining Two Photos for New Effect – Basic

Tutorial running time : 10 minutes.

We’ll start with something basic. In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Marquee Tool, how to adjust the Opacity, working with Layers, creating Paths from a Selection and using the Text Tool. Let’s get your feet wet.

Tutorial 2:
Grass Texture – Basic

Tutorial running time : 15 minutes.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a nice-looking grass texture. This tut covers Filters, Rotating an image, Brightness and Contrast and working with Hue and Saturation.

Tutorial 3:
Underwater Effect – Basic

Tutorial running time : 15 minutes.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an underwater scene from scratch, using Gradients, Transform and Filters. As well as getting started with Brushes.

Tutorial 4:
2d Mirror Effect – Basic

Tutorial running time : 10 minutes.

In this tutorial you will learn how to Duplicate, Flip Horizontally/Vertically, Feathering and Blending. Simple, yet effective.

Tutorial 5:
Sony Ericsson Logo – Basic

Tutorial running time : 20 minutes.

This is your first tricky tut. You will learn how to save your time, changing layer styles and using the copies of your initial effect or form. Shapes, Layer Styles, Drop Shadows, Filters, Color Overlay are used very well in this tut.

Tutorial 6:
Paint Graffiti on Wall – Basic

Tutorial running time : 30 minutes.

You will be using custom brushes to recreate the graffiti wall, and working with multiple layers.

Tutorial 7:
Team Fortress 2 Sprays with Transparency – Basic

Tutorial running time : 30 minutes.

This tutorial will show you how to create quality Team Fortress 2 Sprays with transparency using Photoshop.

Tutorial 8:
Google Chrome Logo Design – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 45 minutes.

Similar in concept as Tutorial 5, as in you are creating a logo, but a little more difficult using trickier techniques.

Tutorial 9:
Star Explosion Wallpaper – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 45 minutes.

Create your first wallpaper using textures, glows, and blurs.

Tutorial 10:
Graffiti Wall II – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 45 minutes.

If you felt comfortable with Tutorial 6, then this will be easy for you. Slightly more difficult, but the effect is far better .

Tutorial 11:
Spectacular Grass Text Effect – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

This tutorial is made up of three parts — the background, the text itself, and some final extra effects.

Tutorial 12:
MP3 Digital Player Icon – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 60 minutes.

Create a Photoshop MP3 digital player logo icon, using intermediate drawing  .

Tutorial 13:
Cubite Logo – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 70 minutes.

Cubite logo design, similar in concept as Tutorial 12, but having a more realistic finish.

Tutorial 14:
Digital Illustration Using Birds – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

This tutorial is your first step into illustration.

T

Tutorial 15:
Amazing Photo montages – Intermediate

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

This tutorial provides step-by-step guidance on how to make a stunning, dynamic effect that recreates the look of a figure dissolving in water.

Tutorial 16:
War Movie Poster – Advanced

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

In this tutorial you will create a great movie poster, using some simple but efficient techniques.

Tutorial 17:
Recycle Vintage Images to Create a Photoshop Collage – Advanced

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

Learn all about how to assemble a collage in Photoshop and give it a unique retro feel.

Tutorial 18:
Portable Gaming Device Poster – Advanced

Tutorial running time : 90 minutes.

In this Photoshop tutorial you will be walking through the making of an interesting, creative advertisement poster.

Tutorial 19:
Creating a stylized male portrait – Advanced

Tutorial running time : 100 minutes.

In this advanced tutorial you will learn how to create a stylized portrait.

Tutorial 20:
Amazing 3D Text – Advanced

Tutorial running time : 100 minutes.

In this advanced tutorial you will learn how to create very 3D text (using 3d software) and give it life in Photoshop. The final result is amazing.

Are you a Photoshop Expert yet? Don’t give up! download these two indispensable reference PDF files, to help you on your way:
Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows or for MAC.

Adobe Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Morris
Official Photoshop CS4 Free Help Ebook

Watch this video to learn about Photoshop CS4s features:
Photoshop CS4 Interface Overview
This video will bring you up to speed with Photoshop CS4 and all its features.

(Please note this post has no relation or affiliation with Pearson Education/Sams Publishing’s book, “Teach Yourself Photoshop in 24 Hours”)
By Paul Andrew

Preview

This is a preview of the final effect..

Step 1

Create a new document 1440×900 px and fill the background with a radial gradient white pink (#FFFFFF- #FFE0FC).

Step 2

Paste this picture of a flying crane into a new layer named “Crane”, resize it and extract it from its background.

Step 3

Download macbadshoes’ watercolor brushes. Select one of the brushes of the set and paint a pink or violet shape (#D1A7CD) into a new layer named “Watercolor 1″, then put “Watercolor1″ layer above all the others and change its Blend Mode to Color Burn.

Step 4

Use an “S” shaped brush to paint a large watercolor pink (#EFB9EB) background. Paint this into a new layer named “Watercolor 2″ this time and change its Blend Mode to Multiply.

Step 5

Next, on Brushes palette, select the Dry brushes set, and select any of them. Over Brush options, change the size to 79px, Blend mode to Overlay, and both Opacity and Flow to 30%. Then just paint over “Crane” layer here and there using several colors. Paint the shapes randomly.

Step 6

Select “Crane” layer, then go to Filters > Filter Gallery > Artistic > Dry Brush, set the values shown below and see how it looks.

Step 7

As a final watercolor detail, by using another “S” shaped watercolor brush, draw some soft pink shapes on the background.

Step 8

Add your desired text, I’m using Scriptina and Eras Light ITC.

Step 9

Finally add a texture. I’m using this paper texture form stockxchng. Paste it into a new layer above all the other and change its Blending Mode to Multiply and its Opacity to 75%.

Conclusion

And that’s it, a simple and fun way to turn any picture into watercolor, try your own!.

The Example

Getting Started

The color picker can be downloaded from the jQuery UI download page and then included in our page using the <script> tag. Furthermore, the CSS file that is inside the default theme folder should be included, as should all of the images. There are a fair number of items to include for the color picker, but they are needed to form the interface. These should be placed within your <head> tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="ui.colorpicker.css"/>
<script language="JavaScript" src="jQuery.js"></script>
<script language="JavaScript" src="jQuery.colorpicker.js"></script>

All we need to do to make use of the color picker gadget is to call the .colorpicker function on a form field or div to begin:

$('#picker').colorpicker({ flat: true });

By attaching the picker to just a div and specifying the flat parameter to be true, you should see the following:

It is worth an honorary mention that the eventName parameter can be set to the name of the event that should trigger the opening of the color picker. That is, you can specify to have the color picker show up on mouseover instead of the standard click.

Wrapping Things Up

By placing the hex code into the text field at the end, we ensure that we can access the hex code from normal forms and JavaScript alike. By using standard convention with the form handling, this method also ensures that there is a safe fallback to users who have JavaScript disabled. The following is the completed example using the hide event to return the hex code, and then making use of that hex code to style the page.

Tutorial kindly written by Nathan Wong

If you’re a programmer, you must have some basic knowledge about phothoshop, layers, slicing and obviously Wordpress. Anyway, if you’re an intermediate – advanced level webdesigner, I’m sure you’ll find this useful.

Step 1 – Let’s begin

Open the .psd file.

First, hide all the layers containing text, links or content images. Leave the design as clean as possible, just show the containers. As you can see below, I’m showing the background, the header, the main content container and the sidebar background. Of course you must have a folder to put all the images in, also I’m creating two directories inside /images these are /jpgs and /pngs to store JPEG and PNG files respectively.

A good practice is start coding a small framework on a blank .html file and then apply a single stylesheet to it, after that, you can move forward and turns these files into a full Wordpress theme.

Step 2 – The main background

Let’s start slicing the images. There’s several ways of slicing in photoshop, I prefer use the Crop tool, because it works just fine on these kind of designs ( is the easiest way IMO), but at this point you’ll not need to crop anything, just hide everything except the City Background and the Fill layer (color: #000000).

Then hit Command (Ctrl) + Option (Alt) + Shift + S to activate the Save for web options. Select the file type as .jpg and set the Quality value to 70. Hit Save and put it under /images/jpgs folder.

Step 3 – Ready to slice

Now one of the funniest things of the entire process, Slicing!. First hide all the background layers, including the city picture, and the black background, also hide the logo. Try to get something like the image below.

Step 4 – Slicing background images

Once you had only the content layers visible, Save your document with another name, and on Layers palette go to Merge Visible, this way you’ll merge all the layers but preserving the transparent background (Do not Flatten the image). Next, using the Slice or Crop tool cut the header image, the content background (1px height is fine, I’m making it bigger just for visual purposes), the sidebar background (1px height), the sidebar footer, and the footer background. See the image below to check the measurements. You must use the Guides to cut the images on the right way. Save each image as a PNG-24 file using the Save for Web options, you can use the names suggested below.

By saving the backgrounds as PNGs files we’ll be able to give our design a floating effect. If you’re using IE6… don’t worry, just switch to Firefox, Chrome, or IE7 for a while, we’ll take care of IE6 next time.

Step 5 – The HTML framework

Now let’s start coding. First we’ll need a html framework to work with and a single css file, then we’ll convert that html file into a wordpress theme.

Start with the head tag.

<head>  	<title>GenerationX</title> 	<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> </head>

We’ll divide the layout this way:

All your html containers must be inside a div called "page":

<body>	<div id="page">
		<!--Insert the layout here-->

	</div> <!--End of "page"--></body>

Let’s add the header:

<div id="header">
	<div id="headerimg">
		Page title
	</div>

	<div id="top_nav">
		<ul>
			<li>Home</li>
			<li>About</li>
		</ul>

	</div> 
</div> <!--End of "header"-->

The main content will include the posts and the sidebar:

<div id="content">

   <div class="blogcontent">
   <div class="post">
   <div class="post_title">
   <h2><a href="#">Sample Post</a></h2>

   <small>November 2nd, 2008 | by admin | <a href="#">Lorem ipsum</a>| <a href="#">Category 1</a>| <a href="#">Uncategorized</a></small>

   </div> <!--End of "post title"-->
   <!--Comments-->
   <div class="postmetadata">
   <a href="#">2</a>

   </div>
   <br class="space" />

   <div class="entry">
   <p>
   <a href="#">

   <img class="alignleft" title="pic-02" src="images/jpgs/pic-01.jpg" border="0" alt=""/>
   </a>

   But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids <a href="#">pleasure</a> itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.
   </p>

   <a href="#" class="more-link">Read more &raquo;</a>
 </div> <!--End of "entry"-->

   </div> <!--End of "post"-->
   </div> <!--End of "blogcontent"-->
 <div id="sidebar">

   <ul>
   <li class="categories">
   <h2>Categories</h2>
   <ul>
   <li><a href="#">Lorem ipsum</a> (2)</li>

   <li><a href="#">Category 2</a> (1)</li>
   <li><a href="#">Sample category 3</a> (15)</li>
   </ul>

   </li> 

   <li class="archives">
   <h2>Archives</h2>
   <ul>
   <li><a href="#">November 2008</a> (2)</li>
   </ul>

   </li>
 <li class="linkcat">
   <h2>Blogroll</h2>
   <ul class='blogroll'>
   <li><a href="http://wordpress.org/development/">Development Blog</a></li>
   <li><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/">Themes</a></li>
   <li><a href="http://planet.wordpress.org/">WordPress Planet</a></li>
   </ul>
   </li>
   </ul> <!--End of sidebar's list-->

   <div id="search">
   <form>
   <label class="hidden">Search for:</label>
   <div>
   <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" />
   <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
   </div>
   </form>
   </div> <!--End of "search"-->

   </div> <!--End of "sidebar"-->

 <div class="bottom_sidebar">
   <a href="#">RSS feed</a>
   </div>
   </div> <!--End of "content"-->  

Then the footer:

<br style="clear: both;" /> 

 <div id="footer">
 <div class="column1">
 Author
 <br />
 <a href="#">Author's link</a><br />
 <a href="#">License</a>
 <div class="bottom">
 Slogan
 </div>
 </div>
 <div class="column2">
   <h2>Recent posts</h2>
   <ul>
   <li><a href="#">Sample post</a></li>
   <li><a href="#">Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet</a></li>
   </ul>
   </div> 

   <div class="column2">
   <h2>Pages</h2>
   <ul>
   <li><a href="#" title="About">About</a></li>

   <li><a href="#" title="About">About</a></li>
   </ul>
   </div>
   </div>

Step 6 - Browsing

As we have our main layout already coded, let's test it into a browser, for this tutorial I'm using the last release of Firefox. At this point you should have something like the image below.

Step 7 - Containers and positions

Now start creating the .css file. First you must set the containers in their proper place, that could be a hard work the first times, but with practice it's really easy. You must play with height, width and float values.

First you must define your css classes and ids and set some commons styles as links and paragraphs. Check the .html file of step 5 and look at the class names. Besides, at this point you may use bright background colors to see if your containers are in the right place. Check the Step 4, there're the sizes of the background images.

body
   {
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px;
   text-align: center;
   }

h1, h2, h3, ul, li, p, form
   {
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px
   }

hr
   {
   display: none;
   }

a{
   text-decoration:none;
   }

a:hover{
   text-decoration:underline;
   }

.space
   {
   clear: both;
   }

#page
   {
   margin: 0px auto;
   padding: 0;
   width: 960px;
   }

#header
   {
   background:#CCCCCC;
	height: 308px;
   width: 960px;
   text-align: center;
   }

#headerimg
   {
   margin: 0px;
   text-align: left;
   }

#top_nav
   {
   background-color:#0066CC;
   height: 45px;
   padding-left: 105px;
   text-align: left;
   }

 #top_nav ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   }

   #top_nav li
   {
   display: inline;
   }

   #top_nav li a:hover
   {
   }

#content
   {
   background: #009933;
   float: left;
   text-align: left;
   }

.blogcontent
   {
   float: left;
   padding: 10px 0px;
   width: 635px;
   }

.post
   {
   text-align: left;
   }

 .post h2
   {
   padding: 0px;
   }

 .post .post_title
   {
   float: left;
   width: 90%;
   }

   .post_title h2, a
   {
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .post_title a
   {
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   .post_title a:hover
   {
   }

   .post_title small
   {
   }

   .post_title small a
   {
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .post .postmetadata
   {
   float: right;
   height: 34px;
   padding: 12px 5px;
   width: 35px;
   }

   .postmetadata a
   {
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   .postmetadata span
   {
   padding-left:5px;
   }

.entry
   {
   }

 .entry a
   {
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .entry a:hover
   {
   }

   .entry blockquote
   {
   border: 2px dashed #042748;
   }

   .entry img
   {
   float: left;
   }

   .entry ul
   {
   }

   .entry li
   {

   }

   .entry ol li
   {
   list-style: decimal;
   } 

   .entry p
   {
   text-align: justify;
   padding: 0px;
   }

   .entry span
   {
   }

#sidebar
   {
   background-color:#6666CC;
   float: left;
   padding: 0px 20px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 285px;
   }

 #sidebar ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   #sidebar li
   {
   margin: 0px;
   }

   #sidebar li h2
   {
   margin: 0px;
   }

 #sidebar ul ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li
   {
   margin: 0px;
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li a
   {
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li a:hover
   {
   }

.bottom_sidebar
   {
   background-color:#006666;
   float: right;
   height: 90px;
   width: 310px;
   }

#search
   {  }

 #search input
   {

 }

#search #searchsubmit
   {
   background: #b1b1b1;
}

#footer
   {
   background:#999966;
   height: 200px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 960px;/*909*/
   }

 #footer .column1
   {
   background:#FF3333;
   float: left;
	width: 300px;
   }

   .column1 .bottom
   {

}

   .column1 a
   {
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   #footer .column2
   {
   background-color:#006699;
   float: left;
   width: 250px;
   }

   .column2 h2
   {
   }

   .column2 ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   }

   .column2 a
   {
   text-decoration: none;
   }

Test your html file into your browser. You should have something like the image below.

Step 8 - Adding background images

Now add your background images. This time we'll use PNGs files for the most backgrounds, because our city background must be fixed and we want a floating illusion effect. Remember Step 4? Now match those images with the css containers.

body
   {
 background: #000000 url('./images/jpgs/bg-image.jpg') fixed no-repeat bottom center;
 margin: 0px;
 padding: 0px;
 text-align: center;
 }

 #header
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/header-960x308.png') no-repeat top left;
   height: 308px;
   width: 960px;
   text-align: center;
   }

#content
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bg-635x1.png') repeat-y top left;
   float: left;
   text-align: left;
   }

#sidebar
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bg-325x1.png') repeat-y top left;
   float: left;
   padding: 0px 20px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 285px;
   }

.bottom_sidebar
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bottom-325x90.png') no-repeat bottom center;
   float: right;
   padding: 0px 0px 0px 15px;
   height: 90px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 310px;
   }

#footer
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/footer-960x200.png') no-repeat top left;
   height: 200px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 960px;
   }

Test the result in your browser.

Step 9 - Adding foreground images

Now replace the logo, navigation links, comments background, graphic slogan and rss icon, for their respective images.

<div id="header">
 	<div id="headerimg">
 		<a href="#"><img alt="Generation X" border="0" src="./images/pngs/logo-480x135.png" /></a>

 	</div>
 	<div id="top_nav">
 		<ul>
 			<li><a href="#"><img alt="Home" border="0" src="./images/pngs/home.png" /></a></li>
 			<li><a href="#"><img alt="About" border="0" src="./images/pngs/about.png" /></a></li>

 		</ul>
 	</div>
 </div> 

.
.
.

 <div class="bottom_sidebar"> 		<a href="#"><img alt="0" border="0" src="./images/pngs/rss.png" /></a> </div>

.
.
.

<div class="bottom"> 		<img alt="" border="0" src="./images/pngs/footer-115x51.png" /></div>

And the css to make the images fit:

#headerimg
{
	 height: 185px;
	 margin: 0px;
	 padding: 55px 0px 0px 45px;
	 text-align: left;
 }

#top_nav
{
	 height: 45px;
	 padding-left: 105px;
	 text-align: left;
}

#top_nav li a:hover
{
   background: url('./images/pngs/hover.png') no-repeat bottom center;
}

.bottom_sidebar
{
 	background: url('./images/pngs/bottom-325x90.png') no-repeat bottom center;
 	float: right;
 	padding: 0px 0px 0px 15px;
 	height: 90px;
 	text-align: left;
 	width: 310px;
 }

.post .postmetadata{	background: url('./images/pngs/bg-45x58.png') no-repeat top left;	float: right;	height: 34px;	padding: 12px 10px;	width: 25px;}

 #footer .column1
 {
	float: left;
	font: normal 10px Arial;
	padding: 0px 0px 0px 80px;
	width: 300px;
 }

 .column1 .bottom
 {
 	padding: 50px 0px 0px 40px;
 }

At the end you should get something like this image:

Step 10 - Text styles

We're close to finish the mock-up, now we need to add the text styles for the content (posts), sidebar and footer. Play with typography and colors as you want. The most important at this point is to place the text in a right place, for this you must take care about padding and margin values, i.e. for the list items on the sidebar I set a left padding of 20 pixels and 0 px margin:

 #sidebar li    {margin: 0px;   padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px;   }

You can just copy the css style below:

body
   {
 background: #000000 url('./images/jpgs/bg-image.jpg') fixed no-repeat bottom center;
 color: #333;
 margin: 0px;
 padding: 0px;
 text-align: center;
 }
h1, h2, h3, ul, li, p, form
   {
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px
   }
hr
   {
   display: none;
   }
a{
   text-decoration:none;
   }
a:hover{
   text-decoration:underline;
   }
.space
   {
   clear: both;
   }
#page
   {
   margin: 0px auto;
   padding: 0;
   width: 960px;/*909*/
   }
#header
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/header-960x308.png') no-repeat top left;
   height: 308px;
   width: 960px;/*909*/
   text-align: center;
   }
#headerimg
   {
   height: 185px;
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 55px 0px 0px 45px;
   text-align: left;
   }
#top_nav
   {
   height: 45px;
   padding-left: 105px;
   text-align: left;
   }
 #top_nav ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   }

   #top_nav li
   {
   display: inline;
   }

   #top_nav li a:hover
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/hover.png') no-repeat bottom center;
   }
#top_sidebar
   {
   color: #fff;
   font-weight: bold;
   height: 10px;
   padding-right: 155px;
   text-align: right;
   }
#content
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bg-635x1.png') repeat-y top left;
   float: left;
   text-align: left;
   }
.blogcontent, .widecolumn
   {
   float: left;
   padding: 10px 0px;
   width: 635px;
   }
 .blogcontent form
   {
   color: #fff;
   padding: 10px 50px 0px 90px;
   }

   .blogcontent input
   {
   background-color: transparent;
   border: 1px solid #214b73;
   color: #fff;
   }

   .blogcontent #searchsubmit
   {
   background: #b1b1b1;
   color: #214b73;
   font-weight: bold;
   padding: 2px;
   }

   .blogcontent h2
   {
   color: #fff;
   font: bold 18px  Georgia, Arial;
   padding: 0px 50px 0px 90px;
   }

   .blogcontent small a
   {
   font-size: 18px;
   padding: 0px 50px 0px 90px;
   }
.post
   {
   padding: 0px 50px 0px 90px;
   text-align: left;
   }
 .post h2
   {
   color: #fff;
   padding: 0px;
   }

 .post .post_title
   {
   float: left;
   width: 90%;
   }

   .post_title h2, a
   {
   color: #b31414;
   font: normal 24px Georgia, Arial;
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .post_title a
   {
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   .post_title a:hover
   {
   color: #fff;
   }

   .post_title small
   {
   color: #385673;
   font: normal 12px Georgia, Arial;
   }

   .post_title small a
   {
   color: #385673;
   font: normal 12px Georgia, Arial;
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .post .postmetadata
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bg-45x58.png') no-repeat top left;
   float: right;
   height: 34px;
   padding: 12px 10px;
   width: 25px;
   }

   .postmetadata a
   {
   color: #416fa3;
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   .postmetadata span
   {
   color: #416fa3;
   font: normal 24px Georgia, Arial;
   padding-left:5px;
   }
 .entry
   {
   color: #c3c3c3;
   font: normal 12px Arial;
   padding: 20px 0px;
   }
 .entry a
   {
   color: #385673;
   font: normal 12px Georgia, Arial;
   padding: 0px;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   .entry a:hover
   {
   color: #69c;
   }

   .entry blockquote
   {
   border: 2px dashed #042748;
   padding: 8px;
   }

   .entry img
   {
   float: left;
   padding: 0px 20px 0px 0px;
   }

   .entry ul
   {
   padding-left: 20px;
   }

   .entry li
   {
   list-style: url('./images/pngs/bull-list.png');
   }

   .entry ol li
   {
   list-style: decimal;
   } 

   .entry p
   {
   text-align: justify;
   padding: 0px;
   }

   .entry span
   {
   color: #b31414;
   }
#sidebar
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bg-325x1.png') repeat-y top left;
   float: left;
   padding: 0px 20px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 285px;
   }
 #sidebar ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 5px 0px;
   }

   #sidebar li
   {
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px 0px 0px 20px;
   }

   #sidebar li h2
   {
   color: #fff;
   font: normal 18px Rockwell, Georgia, Arial;
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 10px 0px;
   }
  #sidebar ul ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   margin: 0px;
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li
   {
   margin: 0px;
   padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li a
   {
   color: #69c;
   font: normal 12px Arial;
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   #sidebar ul ul li a:hover
   {
   color: #b31414;
   }
 .bottom_sidebar
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/bottom-325x90.png') no-repeat bottom center;
   float: right;
   padding: 0px 0px 0px 15px;
   height: 90px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 310px;
   }

#search
   {
   font: bold 12px Arial;
   color: #fff;
   padding: 0px 0px 15px 15px;
   }
 #search input
   {
   background-color: transparent;
   border: 1px solid #214b73;
   color: #fff;
   }
 #search #searchsubmit
   {
   background:#0B192C;
   color: #FFFFFF;
   font-weight: bold;
   padding: 2px;
   }
#footer
   {
   background: url('./images/pngs/footer-960x200.png') no-repeat top left;
   color: #fff;
   height: 200px;
   text-align: left;
   width: 960px;
   }
 #footer .column1
   {
   float: left;
   font: normal 10px Arial;
   padding: 0px 0px 0px 80px;
   width: 300px;
   }

   .column1 .bottom
   {
   padding: 50px 0px 0px 40px;
   }

   .column1 a
   {
   color: #fff;
   font: normal 12px Arial;
   text-decoration: none;
   }

   #footer .column2
   {
   float: left;
   font: normal 12px Arial;
   padding: 35px 0px 0px 0px;
   width: 250px;
   }

   .column2 h2
   {
   color: #457db9;
   font: normal 20px Rockwell;
   }

   .column2 ul
   {
   list-style: none;
   }

   .column2 a
   {
   color: #fff;
   font: normal 12px Arial;
   text-decoration: none;
   }

Now you should have something like following image. The mock up is ready; now let's turn this into a Wordpress template.

Step 11 - Wordpress Template

First you'll need to duplicate the template files into a new folder inside /wp-content/themes . You can copy and paste all the files of "default" theme into a new folder that we call "generationx".

The process now is really simple, just replace all the static content on your html file for the wordpress functions and save them into their respective files. First paste into /generationx folder your style.css file, replacing the original one.

Let's start with header.php file, this is what you have into you .html mockup:

<head>
 <title>GenerationX</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> 

</head>
<div id="page">

	<div id="header">
 		<div id="headerimg">
 			<a href="#"><img alt="Generation X" border="0" src="./images/pngs/logo-480x135.png" /></a>

 		</div>
 		<div id="top_nav">
 			<ul>
 				<li><a href="#"><img alt="Home" border="0" src="./images/pngs/home.png" /></a></li>
 			<li><a href="#"><img alt="About" border="0" src="./images/pngs/about.png" /></a></li>

			 </ul>
	 	</div>
	</div> <!-- end of header -->

You'll need to turn that into the following code on header.php file, for this use the original header.php file to see where to put the code in:

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

   <link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
</style>

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>
<body>
   <div id="page">

		<div id="header">
   		<div id="headerimg">

			   <a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><img alt="Generation X" border="0" src="./wp-content/themes/generationx/images/pngs/logo-480x135.png" /></a>
			</div>

   		<div id="top_nav">
   			<ul>
				   <li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>"><img alt="Home" border="0" src="./wp-content/themes/generationx/images/pngs/home.png" /></a></li>

				   <li><a href="?page_id=2"><img alt="About" border="0" src="./wp-content/themes/generationx/images/pngs/about.png" /></a></li>

			   </ul>
		   </div>
		 </div>

As you can see I'm converting the static content of href, texts, paths and turn them into a dynamic content using the wordpress functions.

Now you must repeat that on every single .php file into the theme folder. This is maybe the hardest part of the entire process, because there's a lot of files and tiny details.

The main files are:

• index.php - includes the famous "loop". You'll need to change this tag there: <div id="content">
• header.php - includes the html heading data and these tags: <head>, <body> and the header containers like logo and navigation bar.
• sidebar.php - includes all the sidebar contents like Categories, archives, blogroll, search form and RSS icon.
• footer.php - includes the closing tags for <div id="page"> </body> and </html>
• page.php - it has the "pages" template
• single.php - it has the "single" post template

Our html mockup is an easy way to follow the wordpress structure, but turning the static content into dynamic wordpress isn't a quick job, it will take you several hours of testing and debugging.

To run this custom template, login into your Wordpress admin panel, go to Design > Themes and select your brand new GenerationX template, activate it and see how it looks.

Here's the step by step HTML source code

Tutorial files

Theme Design Lessons

How To Create A Wordpress Theme From Scratch

Good walk through in detail on creation of themes.

The 5 Minute Theme

Fast way of making simple a simple wp theme.

Turn Any Web Template Into a Theme

This flash tutorial shows how to turn any web page into a wordpress theme. The flash movie is pretty distorted but gives a good idea of what can be achieved.

Mocking Up a Theme In Photoshop

A bit of self promotion! This tutorial shows how to mock up a modern theme in photoshop.

16 Lessons On Theme Creation

Covers all bases in detail, really comprehensive lessons on all aspects of Wordpress theme creation from header to footer!

4 Step Theme Design Guide

Part 1 – Pulling it apart; Part 2 – Complete design, header, and footer; Part 3 – The sidebar; Part 4 – The content.

Basic Intoduction To Themes

Good post breaking down how the themes work for those new to Wordpress.

Offical Wordpress Documentation

The Wordpress.org Codex with theme design documentation.

Wordpress Templates For Redesign

Premium Theme Design with Thesis

Want a head start in your new theme design? Thesis will cost you $87 but it been typeset extremely well and is simple to customise the design for stunning results quickly. You’ll save the purchase price in design time with Thesis. (disclosure: URL contains our affiliate tracker)

Create Flexible Themes

Free to use selection of Wordpress themes, good for customization.

100 Free Templates

Helpful Software and Cheats

Theme Editor For Dreamweaver

Now when you open a wordpress theme in Dreamweaver the whole thing is visable – legend.

Inspiration

We Love WP!

Showcase of Wordpress powered websites.

Ready Made Swatches

Great selection of swatch and color scheme ready to choose from.

CSS Galleries

Go to the bottom of this post for links to lots of CSS galleries for design inspiration.

Freebies

Free Stock Images

381k free images, an awesome free collection.

Creative Commons Images at Flickr

50 million plus creative commons images for use, make sure to check the iicences for usage permissions.

Basic Theme Creator

Basic online theme design tool, change the element color in real time then save your theme.

More Theme Resouces

40 more resource links for Wordpress theme design.

Free Social Icons

Free social icons to use on your blog.

Validation and Testing

w3c Validation Service

Well know and classic, but worth a mention.

Cross Browser Checking

View screenshots of your finished theme in all the browsers.

The Finished Datepicker Example

Getting Started

In order to use the datepicker, we need to download it from the jQuery UI download page and link it into our page as we do with the jQuery library. Applying the datepicker requires no HTML changes, and instead simply attaches itself to existing input fields. This is done with a single line of code:

	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker();
	

The standard date picker that is shown is admittedly fairly ugly and impractical in both size and look.

Customization

The real power of jQuery’s datepicker is the level of customization. We’ll go through three quick steps toward creating a datepicker that’s right for our example situation. This should give you enough examples and variations for you to choose the right parameters for your situation, too.

Styling

First up, we’re going to make the calendar popup itself a little more appealing for the sake of making more practical decisions around the actual placement of the calendar. jQuery provides a handful of CSS stylesheets to chose from, but you can of course always write your own or modify them if you don’t like them. With the first theme, the calendar looks like this:

Date Format

Specifying the date format is just a matter of passing a parameter to the .datepicker() initialization function. Here are some common formats:

	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: $.datepicker.W3C }); // 2008-01-31
	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'mm/dd/y' }); // 01/31/08
	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'm/d/yy' }); // 1/31/2008
	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'M d, yy' }); // Jan 31, 2008
	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'MM d, yy' }); // January 31, 2008
	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ dateFormat: 'D, M d, yy' }); // Thurs, Jan 31, 2008
	

This leaves you with control over the order, separaters (slash, dash, or space), whether or not you want leading zeros on your days or months, whether you want numbers or words, and what you include or omit (year, day name, etc.).

These affect the format that the date shows up in the field after you select it:

Behavior

The last customization that we’re going to look at here is the popup behavior. By default, the event is attached to the focus of the input field that the datepicker widget is attached to. This can easily be changed so that the event is attached to either a button or an image next to the field instead.

	$('#trip input#leavedate').datepicker({ showOn: 'button', buttonImage: 'calendar.gif', buttonImageOnly: true });
	

This makes the calendar popup look like this:

Wrapping Everything Up

These customizations are what make the jQuery datepicker UI widget so powerful, as the widget is practical in a variety of situations. The following is the completed example using the customizations discussed above.

Tutorial kindly written by Nathan Wong

I’m Alvaro Guzman and in part 1 I’ll show you how to design a modern web interface from scratch using Photoshop and stock pictures. You can download the finished psd file at the end of this tutorial. Firstly let’s have a look at the finished psd mock up:

The Finished Mock Up

Step 1

Let’s get started, first create a new blank document and draw some guides to delimite your design, 960px width is just fine, then increase your canvas size to see how it looks on wider resolutions, maybe to 1200-1260px. Do the same with the Height, start with 800px then increase the height to 1000px at least.

Step 2

Now paste this image as a background, resize and place it in the bottom of our design. Create a new layer above the image then select two tones of purple-blue as foreground and background colors then go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Next apply "City" layer a Gradient Layer Mask to merge it with the clouds. Then put a black background behind the merged image and to finish the main background add another Gradient Layer Mask to the resultant image.

Step 3

For the header background, draw a Rounded corner rectangle above all the layers, then apply to it a Gradient overlay effect, use the colors shown below.

Step 4

Now paste this image above the rectangle, change the paper layer Blending Mode to Vivid Light and Opacity to 50%. Command (Ctrl) + Click the rectangle layer and by going to Select > Modify > Contract, contract the selection a little bit, hot Command (Ctrl) + Shift + I to inverse the selection and delete all the extra paper. You can also add some layer effects to the rounded rectangle as an Outer Glow or maybe a Stroke effect, it’s up to you.

Step 5

Let’s add the logo, I’m adding the text "Generation X" (Rockwell typeface) because I’m a huge fan of 90’s culture. Then apply to each text layer the Following layer effects, just notice the Stroke color should change depending the text color.

Step 6

Now draw a rounded rectangle as the sidebar background, set the Fill value to 75% and apply a Stroke effect on it.

Step 7

Repeat the previous step with the content background. At this point we have the basic layout.

Step 8

Now let’s add some graphic details and support images, first paste this picture of a nice cassette avobe all the layers of the design, I added some text on it using my tablet. Then select the tiny transparent plastic in the middle of the cassette, cut it and paste it just in the same place but dow its opacity to 50% or 60%. Then, merge both images and place the cassette just above the sidebar.

Step 9

This is a quick trick to create shadows, duplicate the object and put it behind the original, press Command (Ctrl) + U and set the Lightness value to -100, then apply a Gaussian Blur to the copy.

Step 10

Paste this paper image and put it below the header background on layers palette, this will be our navigation bar. Use the Lasso tool to extract the image.

Step 11

Create a new layer above the paper, make an eliptical selection and fill it with black, then apply to it a Gaussian Blur filter and down the layer Opacity to 75%.

Step 12

Duplicate the paper layer and rotate it a little bit, the apply to it a drop shadow to make it pop. Then you can add the text of your links, you can use a grunge or handwritten typeface.

Step 13

Now at the bottom of our sidebar add the RSS icon, I’m using one of these icons. Also add some related text, using "Rockwell condensed" typeface.

Step 14

Following just add the sidebar text, I’m keeping simple this time. "Rockwell" for the titles and "Georgia" for the links.

Step 15

Then add some posts, Combine different typefaces. I’m using "Georgia" for the titles, and "Arial" for the content, also added a tiny paper sheet to put the comments over, and a support image for each post (2px white border).

Also I’m adding the copyright information in this step.

Step 16

Now duplicate the technique of header’s background but this time as a footer background image.

Step 17

Add the footer’s text, I’m adding two containers for Recent Posts and Pages.

Step 18

Just if you want to, add more graphic details on the footer, like this piece of paper containing a simple slogan.

Step 19

An that’s it! a simple and quick way to mix grunge and modern style to design a inovative blog theme. Try your own!

Downloads

Download the photoshop psd file

In Part 2 we’ll explain how to turn this mock up into a fully functioning premium Wordpress theme. Subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified when Part 2 is published.

The Finished Product

Getting Started

As always, we should be aiming to maintain a minimal XHTML footprint in order to ensure that our code is well structured and sufficiently semantic. In the case of tooltips, we can make use of the title attribute provided for all tags, although most commonly used by the anchor tag and the image tag.

Furthermore, we can discretely signal our jQuery code to display a tooltip by using an uncommon and specific classname such as show-tooltip. Let’s start with the following basic example:

<a href="http://google.com/" class="show-tooltip" title="Start your search with Google!">Google.</a>

By using semantic attributes such as title, we ensure that the browser will degrade nicely for users without JavaScript enabled. The tooltip that loads by default by the browsers should be fairly familiar:

Using jQuery to Override Tooltips

Overriding the default tooltip using jQuery is simple. We construct a new span using jQuery’s $('<span/>'); for each link, fill it with the title tag, and then place this element directly after the anchor tag we found. We also clear the existing title tag to eliminate the default tooltip.

jQuery cuts these operations down significantly. Using the .each(), .html(), and .after() functions, this code is condensed into about a half dozen lines of code.

		$('.show-tooltip').each(function(){
		     $(this).after($('<span/>')
			.attr('class', 'show-tooltip-text')
			.html($(this).attr('title')))
			.attr('title', '');
		});

Alongside this block of code, our setup function also sets the .hover() callbacks that will be manually processing the showing and hiding of the tooltips. Within these callbacks, we can use e.pageX and e.pageY to determine the coordinates of the mouse, and use this to position our tooltip.

With a couple of lines of CSS, we end up with a rough imitation of the standard tooltip we are used to seeing.

Putting it All Together

At this point, the only thing left to do is make it a bit prettier. As this now a normal element that is within our control, we are able use standard CSS on span.show-tooltip-text. This includes adding background images, changing font sizes or colors, and anything else you might want to do for your tooltip. The only real restriction is that you will usually want to keep position: absolute; on this to ensure that it is positioned properly.

Furthermore, we can use jQuery’s built in .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() to help the tooltip look even better.

Wrapping Up

The code to implementing these tooltips is extremely simple and concise, and this allows you to incorporate tooltips into your application without unnecessary bloat and hassle. Tooltips should be used wherever helpful advice can be provided, and now it’s just a matter of adding a title attribute and a classname.

Keep in mind that because we are using .html() instead of .text(), we can incorporate any HTML (including newlines and formatting) into our title, but do be warned that the standard tooltip will not format this properly and therefore degradation may not be ideal.

The Finished Product

The example shows two situations where you would commonly want to have tooltips, although the possibilities are really endless, as indicated by the w3’s decision to allow the title attribute on every tag.

Tutorial kindly written by Nathan Wong

Step 1

We are going to start this icon with the basics. A good suggestion is to envision this icon/image in your head before even designing it. First we sketch what we are thinking by simple scribbling our ideas. See below and example of it:

Step 2

As you can see there is some perspective applied to it and that’s something we should take into consideration when creating icons. We are to achieve similar results, as the sketch should be only to give us a blue print of what is coming next. After sketching, we then transfer this into our Art Board, on Illustrator. We simply create a “square-type” to start:

Step 3

Next we are going to mimic the perspective from our drawing, by applying some 3D effect. See the screenshot below:

Step 4

Here is the result after applying the effect.

Step 5

We have to start applying some effects to achieve the glossy-transparent look. Adding these will give us what we expect. We are going to use different transparencies (screen, multiply, darken, luminosity etc…) to get to them. Below are a few shapes where we are applying those effects! Take a look at the transparency “%” as well as the gradients used. This is very important.

These effects are “key” to use and achieve ANY result. All it takes is time and try things out. See below:

Step 6

After applying these to all your shapes, you should have something similar to the screen below:

Step 7

After designing the box we need to apply similar 3D effects and shape transparencies effects to the logo icon. We should have the same angles applied as well. Below you will see 4 basic steps of what we have already cover (Regular Shape, 3D Applied, Added Shapes and Final Rendering):

Step 8

Below are a few more step on how we create the effects. We first select the shape we wnat to apply the effect. Using our gradient tool (G), we will click and drag into opposite directions. If we want the gloss (Lighten) to be on the top of a shape we need to drag starting from the top to the bottom of the shape. This will apply the effect on top of the shape and one thing to keep in mind is that we need to try different “dragging” instances/moves, until we get the way we want. For every shape we use the same effect a few times. See below a few samples:

Step 9

Now that we have both rendered shapes, we can merge them. Notice that the “front” portion of the box, is placed “on top” of the logo icon, and a transparency of 85% is applied so it becomes see through.

Below is the final rendered icon:

Many thanks to Dellustrations.com for the fantastic icons and tutorial, make sure you check out the full set of free social icons.

The Finished Product

Getting Started

To begin, we need to define our basic menu hierarchy. In order to maintain a structured and semantic approach to this, we will use nothing more than unordered lists of standard links. We’ll use the following code as an example:

<ul id="cssdropdown">
<li class="headlink">
	<a href="mine.html?search_engines">Search Engines</a>
	 <ul>
	  <li><a href="http://google.com/">Google</a></li>
	  <li><a href="http://yahoo.com/">Yahoo</a></li>
	  <li><a href="http://live.com/">Live Search</a></li>
	 </ul>
	 </li>
	  <li class="headlink">
	  <a href="mine.html?shopping">Shopping</a>
         <ul>
	  <li><a href="http://amazon.com/">Amazon</a></li>
	  <li><a href="http://ebay.com/">eBay</a></li>
	  <li><a href="http://craigslist.com/">CraigsList</a></li>
	 </ul>
 </li>
</ul>

You should see something like this:

Creating Dropdown Lists

With our semantic HTML and link structure written out, we can proceed to apply some basic hover techniques that are included in CSS. The :hover pseudo-class is invoked when the mouse is placed over the list item.

We can use CSS to hide the child unordered lists by default, and show them with the :hover pseudo-class, like so:

       li.headlink ul { display: none; }
       li.headlink:hover ul { display: block; }

It is best to take this opportunity to apply some basic styling to the list, such as floating the parent unordered lists in a row, and specifying the width of the unordered list to ensure that no shifting occurs when the elements are hidden or shown. This should look something like this:

The Issue with Internet Explorer

Unfortunately, while the :hover pseudo-class may be elegant, it does not work in Internet Explorer. At this point, a short bit of JavaScript is required to provide a clean fix. All we need to do is select all unordered lists that are within a list item that has the class .headlink and add onmouseover and onmouseout events to them. This can be done in twelve simple lines of code:

	window.onload = function()
	{
		var lis = document.getElementsByTagName('li');
		for(i = 0; i < lis.length; i++)
		{
			var li = lis[i];
			if (li.className == 'headlink')
			{
				li.onmouseover = function() { this.getElementsByTagName('ul').item(0).style.display = 'block'; }
				li.onmouseout = function() { this.getElementsByTagName('ul').item(0).style.display = 'none'; }
			}
		}
	}
	

Those using jQuery are privileged to an even easier solution:

	$(document).ready(function(){
		$('li.headlink').hover(
			function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'block'); },
			function() { $('ul', this).css('display', 'none'); });
	});
	

Putting It All Together

The dropdown menu is now functional in the major browsers, and is ready to be styled, cleaned up, and shipped.

It is advantageous to start by applying a basic style that's a little more appealing than the standard lists. This allows us to visualize how this will fit into our application or design.

Adding Some Flare

With a few extra lines of CSS, the menu is styled and ready to fit into our site.

Wrapping Up

One important aspect of writing a generic dropdown list is to segregate the CSS and JavaScript to ensure that there are no conflicts. The easiest way to do this is to add the #cssdropdown selector in front of every element.

Finally, we check to see if the #cssdropdown div can be moved around freely. This ensures that dropdown menu we have created will flow nicely when integrated with our existing site design or application user interface.

The full code and example remains both basic and concise to exemplify the simplicity of the underlying technique for using dropdown menus on your website. Enjoy!

Tutorial kindly written by Nathan Wong

Got a question about this article? - Ask it here!

Planet with Solar Glow

Beginning with a simple rock for texture this design created a new world with clarity and great detail.

Planet Rings

Create your own Saturn.

Planet With Glow

Similar to the top example but re-enforces the techniques.

Planet With Habitation

Starting with a satellite image from Nasa.

Fire Planet

5 minutes to make this make this planet explode into fire!

Space Explosion Tutorial

We think Psdtuts rocks! And so does this tutorial firely explosion with two planets colliding.

Deep Space Nebula

A colorful Space Nebula using noise with Gaussian distribution and difference clouds.

Photo Realistic Earth Type Planet

This excellent jpg tutorial shows how to make a replica Earth from scratch.

Nebula Tutorial

With realistic gas clouds. Scroll down the target page to find the tutorial.

Land Planet Training

Scroll to the on the target page to the Land Planet by artist Robert Proctor.

Detailed Star Field

According to this tutorial the secret to stunning star fields is “never stopping”, the more layers of stars the better it will be.

Gas Planets

Create a detailed gas giant complete with surface turbulence. Scroll to the gas planet link on the target page.

Asteroid Photshop Tutorial

Simple and quick asteriod with from no source file. Scroll to the asteriod tutorial.

Flaming Planet

Excellent jpg tutorial explaining how to make a flaming planet.

Solar Eclipse

The half way image looks better than the finished one in this tutorial.

Space Ship Attack

Well if we stretch our imagination in the space theme this tutorial of a flying saucer attacking earth just fits. Eitherway, we think that you will agree that the resulting image looks awesome.

Space Lighting Effects

Colorful Nebula with stars and a lens flare for full effect.

Make The Sun

Video on youtube showing how to make the sun.

Starburst

Make a starburst using the cloud filter, ping and then some lighting effects.

Planets and Stars Video

This video tutorial works through quickly, but gives a good feel of each tool and stroke.

Hyperspace Effect

Starting with no source file this tutorial explains how to make a warp effect with ease.

Planet and Space Scene

Comprehensive tutorial covering making a space and planet scene from scratch with a colorful end result.

Unusual Space Enviroment

Fxencore takes a produces and unusual planet image with stunning light streaks.

Space Landscapes

To follow this tutorial make sure you click on the image on the target page to load the whole tutorial. Also at the bottom there are links to the other parts. The finished image is impressive.

Fantasy Space Scene

Produces a planet & cloud scene which is more fantasy than photorealistic.

Creating a Planet

Relax to the music vibe whilst learning to build a planet with this video tutorial.

Stars and Nebula

Create a beautiful space scene.

Broken Planet

Learn to create a planet which is breaking apart with a firery core.

Putting It All Together

Combining techniques.

Space Explosion With Color

Radial exploding effect with shockwaves.

Inspiration and Full Makeover Tutorials

Digital Cosmetic Surgery

This complete transformation is explained in simple steps.

Enhacement Examples

Video showing virtual make overs on lots of different subjects.

Eyes

Changing Eye Color

Change the color of a the eye something more appealling.

Making Seductive Eyes

This finishing effect can be used around the eyes once other eye touch ups are complete to make the person look sultry using shadows.

Red Eye Removal

Shows how to move from normal red eye removal to non distructive red eye removal.

Apply Eye Makeup

Apply eyeshadow, eyeliner and mascara.

Non Destructive Eye Color Changing

This technique is flexible using a mask and a hue and saturation adjustment layer.

Brightening The Eyes

Brighting the eyes is a quick and easy way to make your subject stand out.

Removing Dark Circles

Removing dark circles around the eyes makes the subject look younger and less tired.

Body Adjustments

Facial Weight Loss

Trim off unwanted facial fat using this simple technique.

Waist Fat Removal

Get rid of those love handles!

Breast Enlargement

Body Thinning

Slimming an already very slim model.

Removal of Cellulite

How to transform orange peel cellulite skin to smooth young looking skin.

Making People Pop From The Page

Brings the model out of the background for a stunning effect.

Nose

Making Noses Smaller

Have you ever wondered what you would look like with a smaller nose?

Nose Job

Comprehensive digital nose job in photoshop.

Teeth

Brighten Up Teeth

Brighten teeth using a brightness and contrast adjustment layer to make the fundamental change.

Whiten Teeth

Whiter teeth using a hue/saturation adjustment layer, a brush and a layer mask.

Whitening Teeth and Eyes

Two different methods to whiten the teeth and eyes.

Fingernail and Hands

Making fingernails longer

How to extend the length of finger nails.

Changing Nail Color and Length

Change color of the finger nails and increase the length.

Hair – Virtual Hairdressing

Changing Hair Color

Turn hair into a striking feature.

Making Hair Shine

Make hair shine using an exclusion layer.

Making Grey Hair

Turn your hair grey!

Swapping Hair Styles

A fun way to change the hair style of one model onto another.

From Brunette To Blonde (Video)

This video shows how to change from brunette to blonde.

Removing Hair Roots

Touching out hair roots using the clone stamp tool in blend mode.

Body Piercings and Tattoos

Adding Body Piercings

Add rings to eyebrows and noses.

Removing Tattoos

Remove unsightly tattoos or blemishes so that the skin is clean and flawless.

Apply a Realistic Tattoo

Excellent 8 step method to add a tattoo for a really professional effect.

Adding Tattoos

Fun method to add tattoos to models.

Body Hair

Removing Arm Hair

Adding Beards and Stubble

Reducing Stubble

Clean shave your model and get rid of his stubble. Also a technique to get rid of shadows on the face.

Face Enhancement

Applying Make Up

Apply lip stick and eye shadow.

Face Changing Tutorial

This video explains how to change the shape of nose, chin and lips.

Skin Tone Setting

Tonal color correction explained in photoshop by video.

Improving The Face Using Symmetry

A really effective technique that makes the face perfectly balanced.

Skin Effects

Removing Freckles

Remove freckles and other skin blemishes using gaussian blur and history brush.

Remove Blemishes

A video tutorial similar to the above example.

Add a Romantic Glow

Create a romantic glow around a the models face.

How to Get Perfect Skin

Use the smudge tool to remove wrinkles.

Removing Wrinkles

Retouching Skin

Removing Tan Lines

Get rid of tan lines for that all over tanned look.

Boosting Color To Make People Look Healthly

This simple color boost brings the model to life.

Fast and Easy Facial Retouching

Touch up the fast quickly.

Organization

Write a well structured CSS file without becoming crazy

A detailed and well written post about how to write a well structured CSS file.

Organizing Your Stylesheet Using CSS Edit

Rob Soule of Viget Labs shows you how to organize your style sheets using CSS Edit, a powerful CSS editor built exclusively for the mac.

Tips for organizing your CSS

A set of practical tips for organizing your style sheets.

Tabs and Buttons

Expandable CSS Tabs Tutorial

A tutorial on creating expandable CSS tabs.

Simple Round CSS Buttons

Learn how to create rounded corner buttons with only One Image and One CSS file.

Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors

Beautiful CSS buttons with icon set

Learn how to create a clean set of buttons with CSS and an icon set.

Working with Images

CSS Decorative Gallery

Decorate your images and photo galleries without editing the source images.

Placing text over image using CSS position property

A simple technique for placing text over an image.

Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property

Learn how to create a cool resizing thumbnail effect.

Navigation and Buttons

• 1. Build Beautiful Buttons in Photoshop, Part I
  
• 2. Build Beautiful Buttons in Photoshop, Part II
• 3. How To Create a Stunning Vista Inspired Menu
  
• 4. Simple Web2.0 Navigation Bar

Headers and Backgrounds

• 5. Creating A Cool 3D Web Design Effect
  
• 6. Hero Header Part I
  
• 7. Hero Header Part II
• 8. Easily Create a Beautiful, Unique Website Header
  
• 9. Create a Nature Inspired Painted Background in Photoshop
  (Shameless self promotion)
  
• 10. How To: Make the Viget Inspire Background
  

Web Design Elements

• 11. Elements of Great Web Design: The Polish
  
• 12. How to Create a Simple & Sleek Web 2.0 Site Footer
  
• 13. Creating Web 2.0 Effects With Photoshop, Part 1
• 14. Creating Web 2.0 Effects With Photoshop, Part 2
• 15. Handy Web 2.0 Icons In Photoshop

Interface Design

• 16. Create a Sleek, High-End Web Design from Scratch
  
• 17. Design a Cartoon Grunge Website Layout
  
• 18. Tutzor web 2.0 style design

Saving Imges for Web

• 19. Saving Images for the Web
• 20. The Mysterious “Save For Web” Color Shift
  

Check out the final result. Click on the photos.

Step 1

First, open up a new ActionScript 3 document in Flash, and create three layers: actions, photos, and background. In the properties panel, set the size of your stage. I used 500 x 338 for this example.

Step 2

Our photos need something to lay on, so import a texture to the “background” layer. I chose a nice wood texture.

Select the “photos” layer and import one of your photos to the stage(File > Import > Import to Stage). Before importing, make sure your photos have been resized to fit well on your stage. My photos are 173px x 260px. Select the photo and convert it to a MovieClip(Modify > Convert to Symbol). Make sure that registration point is in the middle and name it “photo1″.

Step 3

Once the image has been converted to a MovieClip, double click on it to view it’s time line. Create a new layer below the one that the photo is on. On this layer, we are going to create a border. Using the Rectangle Tool, create a box that is 20px taller and wider than the photo, and make sure that it is aligned with it’s center.

Step 4

Now lets lift our photo off the table a bit by adding a shadow. To do this, back out to the main time line and select your photo. Next to the properties panel, click on the “Filters” tab and add a Glow filter. Set the color to black and the blur to 10. Now position the photo on the left side of your stage, so there is enough room on the right for it to slide out. Make sure to give it an instance name of “photo1″.

Step 5

Repeat steps 2 – 4 for each of your photos, each time incrementing the number in the name (photo1, photo2, etc).

Step 6

Before we start adding any ActionScript, download the AS3 version of tweener, a class that makes it easy to move things with code. Then extract the “caurina” folder into your projects directory.

Step 7

On the main time line, select frame 1 on the “actions” layer. The first line of our code imports tweener, so we can have access the class. Then we need to define some variables that will make it easy to customize the photo stack later without having to alter the main code.

import caurina.transitions.*;

var photoOriginX:Number = photo1.x;
var photoDestX:Number = photoOriginX + 200;
var speed:Number = .5;
var rotationRange:Number = 10;
var photoCount:Number = 3;
var easeType:String = "easeoutquad";

Step 8

Now lets add two functions. The first is called when a photo is clicked. It moves the photo to the x position that we defined in step 7. It also rotates the photo to a random value.

The second function moves the photo back to it’s origin and changes the depth so that it is on the bottom of the stack. It is called when the first tween is complete.

function photoSlideOut(e:Event):void
{
	e.target.parent.setChildIndex(e.target, e.target.parent.numChildren - 1);
	Tweener.addTween(e.target, {x: photoDestX, time: speed, transition: easeType, onComplete:photoSlideIn, onCompleteParams:[e.target]});
	Tweener.addTween(e.target, {rotation: Math.floor(Math.random()*(rotationRange*2))-rotationRange, time: speed*2, transition: easeType});
}

function photoSlideIn(p:MovieClip)
{
	p.parent.setChildIndex(p, 1);
	Tweener.addTween(p, {x: photoOriginX, time: speed, transition: easeType});
}

Step 9

Initialize the photos by looping through each one and adding the mouse down event and setting an initial random rotation.

for(var i=1; i<=photoCount; i++)
{
	this["photo"+i].addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, photoSlideOut);
	this["photo"+i].rotation =  Math.floor(Math.random()*(rotationRange*2))-rotationRange;
}

That's it. Feel free to experiment with the speed and rotation variables to achieve different types of motion.

Download Example

To give you an idea of how this can be used, try out the sketch pad below:

First Things First

Before we get started, make sure to grab the ActionScript 3 Core Library. The Core Library contains several classes and utilities that make it easy to do things such as MD5 hashing, date formatting, and image encoding to name a few. Once you have the library, just drop it into your classes folder and you are ready to go. Now we can import the JPGEncoder.

import com.adobe.images.JPGEncoder;

Encoding the MovieClip

In this example, we are going to assume that our MovieClip of interest is named sketch_mc. In order to make use of the JPEGEncoder, our MovieClip needs to become a bitmap. To do this, we are going to use the BitmapData class. The contructor for this class requires two arguments: width and height. Since we want our jpeg to be the same size as sketch_mc, we use it’s width and height properties. Then by using sketch_mc as an argument, the draw method draws our MovieClip on to the bitmap.

import com.adobe.images.JPGEncoder;

var jpgSource:BitmapData = new BitmapData (sketch_mc.width, sketch_mc.height);
jpgSource.draw(sketch_mc);

Now that sketch_mc is in bitmap form, we can use the JPGEncoder. When creating a new instance of this class, you can set the level of compression by passing in a number from 1 – 100. Then to create our jpeg, we call the encode method and use our BitmapData instance as the argument. The encode method returns the jpeg in the form of a ByteArray, which is simply an AS3 class that makes working with binary data a little easier.

import com.adobe.images.JPGEncoder;

var jpg