Great resource for Adobe Photoshop users — reference cards for quick overviews of Photoshop’s interface, specific and often-used tools.
Includes links to versions for Photoshop CS3 and CS4 as well as both Macintosh and Windows versions.
Some of the “cards” are actually links to Adobe’s own online help (which is where the default Help in CS4 apps now takes you). But the rest of the cards look helpful in learning or referencing common tools such as the Pen tool, the Marquee tool, and the Brush tool. Worth a look and a download for the reference cards that suit your workflow. Sure to enhance your productivity.
Continue reading 'Photoshop Cheatsheets and Reference Cards: Free Downloads'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Sharon Steuer’s free ”Zen Of The Pen” PDF is an excellent introduction to the inner mysteries of the vector pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.
The pen tool is one of those obscure graphics programs tools that everyone tries once, and then gets so confused by that they never get any further with it. And understandably. It looks like a fountain pen, but it doesn’t act like one. Click and “draw”, you get weird “handles” sprouting out from a dot. Ignore that, and some annoying rubber band line gets stuck to your pen tip, all distorted out of — not even a straight line! Right there most Illustrator users think to themselves “this program sucks”.
But they couldn’t be further from the truth…
Continue reading 'Zen Of The Pen'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Go Media has a free skull reference photo over at their blog. It features a human skull at 15 different angles in one high-resolution Photoshop file.
A perfect resource for running through some Photoshop filters or as a reference for tracing. head over to Go Media to download the file.
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Found this neat little gallery of surfboard logos via Paul Howalt on Twitter. A huge library of surfboard logos, including multiples of some.
These logos aren’t vector art or anything ready for print (unlike the Brands Of The World vector logo library), just a reference library or perhaps a design inspiration resource.
Seems a high percentage of these are photos of the logos on actual surfboards.
Continue reading 'Surfboard Logo Library'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, analagous, brightness, hue, value, saturation, tints, shades… do these words mean anything to you? They should.
A post by cartoonist Matt Glover points out ColorFAQ – very basic web guide to color theory. It got me poking around on the internet for some other sites with some more depth on the subject. Sometimes I forget how much I use color theory every single day, it’s just something that sometimes goes on autopilot and is an easy topic to forget to recommend to others.
Continue reading 'Color Theory Resources'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I touched on the awesomeness of using multiple pencil grades in a previous post on essential cartoonist tools before, but there’s a great overview specifically on pencil grades by cartoonist Matt Glover. There’s some decent additional pencil grade classification information over at Wikipedia as well.
Find out what those cryptic “2B”, “HB”, “6H” and the rest really mean. Knowing the difference, having a full set of pencils with all the grades in the range is a must. This is the way to lay down very thick, dark blacks in your drawings as well as fine, light grays. It’s all in the blackness and hardness my friends.
Continue reading 'Pencil Grades: An Overview'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
I don’t know how legal all of this is, but since we’re talking cartooning here and we’d only be using these under the fair-use parody provisions in copyright law…
Brands of the World has free vector art downloads of just about every single product, brand or company logo you can think of. I checked out the logo of the Miller High Life Girl in the Moon, and the vector art is pretty good. It looks like there may have been some Illustrator Auto-Trace going on, but the quality is decent.
Continue reading 'Free Vector Logo & Brand Art – Brands Of The World'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
(via Gilbert Consulting Design Tips): Ever need to find a font that looks just like some famous brand, company or product?
Here are some resources for finding typefaces/fonts for all sorts of brands, famous foods, drinks, candy, restaurants, businesses/companies, bands/musicians, TV shows, sports teams, cars/automobiles, games & video games, publications, sports teams and more:
FamousFonts
Sharkshock Fonts
TypoWiki
Some fonts on FamousFonts are only for ID, but they do tell you the name of the typeface and the foundry (with links where available). Sharkshock seems to offer downloads of everything they show on the site. TypoWiki is more corporate-oriented, the other two more pop-culture related. Also, TypoWiki is (as the name implies) more of a Wikipedia-based reference guide than a download site.
Good stuff, and these things come in handy, usually for some sort of gag or parody – but worth it!
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Ever find that you are trying to copy & paste ( or drag & drop) vector art from one Illustrator file to another, only to find all your transparency and other Appearance effects gone? I have to Google this every time it happens, so I thought I would make a post for it so I can look it up for myself, and help a few others along the way. Of course remembering this would be helpful, but I can’t count on that! Continue reading 'Illustrator tip: Preserving transparency & effects on the clipboard (using copy/paste)'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
A quick post regarding an issue brought up by a comment to my original post about the Pantone Huey and dual (or multiple) monitors… Continue reading 'Use A Pantone Huey Monitor Calibrator On Dual Monitors'
by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.
Social Stuff