Friday, September 27, 2013

Freebie Friday - Black & White Textile Textures 2


Hi again!

This week there are six more black and white patterned textiles for your artistic endeavors. And I've got enough left for a third segment of black and white textures next Friday. :)





As usual, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend!

Friday, September 20, 2013

Freebie Friday - Black & White Textile Textures

Hi!

This week I've got a set of six black and white patterned textiles for your artistic endeavors. And I've got plenty more stocked up, so stay tuned for more next week.




As usual, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend, be it rainy or sunny! :)

Friday, September 6, 2013

Freebie Friday - Coffee Stain Textures

Hello!

This week we're taking a break from textile textures and instead I'm posting some coffee stained paper textures.







And an extra, 7th one for luck!
This one actually looks more ominous than lucky...oops!













Again, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

Now go spill these textures on your art! And send me a link if you indeed do. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

A good weekend to you all!

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Wordy Wednesday - My Typographic Trials

Hi! Before you do anything else:

Now you may read at your leisure.

So, this past month of so I've taken more of an interest in experimenting with some illustrating text, hand-drawn typography, popular sayings and so forth.

Once I've worked digitally, using existing fonts and my textures to make a fun, quirky poster: "Keep Calm and Pattern On".


Another time, I enjoyed working mostly traditional - like when I entered Moo.com's calligraphy competition with my "Stop and Smell the Roses" piece.


Afterwards I decided to digitize it by cleaning up the scan in Photoshop and working with the Live Trace and Smooth tools in Illustrator:

black + white + red version

black + white + pink version

That's usually my preferred way of digitizing my letter line-work. If I neatly ink my letters the process of smoothing out any jaggedness from the live trace goes pretty fast. That's also how I completed my "Merci" piece:


Simpler version
At first I just concentrated on getting the letters into the shapes that I liked. Once I was happy with the letters, I scanned the image in, and printed it out. I then sketched over that in pencil the floral details. Then with the help of my light table (Also known as my window...I don't actually own a light table) I traced the sketched over image on to my good piece of paper. I did this extra step because I wanted a pretty original to keep. So...then I scanned that back into my computer and vectorized it.

I was quite happy with this "Merci" piece. I was going for an Art Nouveau feel and I think it came out to be a nice nod to that.

Looking back at "Stop and Smell the Roses" I thought it would be nice to turn that into a little series that would encourage me to work on my typography more, and so I went ahead and began to work on "Stop & Smell the Coffee". This piece didn't go as smoothly as the other one at all.

For some reason I thought I could wing it without doing any compositional sketches and instead just sketching it out a few times on to my good piece of paper...yeah, not the best plan. I ended up with this:
It had some good ideas, but the layout turned out to be awkward. At first I thought I could just fix the layout issue digitally by just nudging things around, but it wasn't as simple as that.
attempt #1

Then I thought I'd just move the top part down. A bit better, but definitely didn't feel right.
attempt #2
In turn, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I liked the "coffee" lettering so decided to draw the other letters with those kind of proportions. And then, after a whole bunch of fiddling I felt better. I was more calculated and methodical with this piece - vectorizing the letters using the precision producing Pen tool, as well as aligning and proportioning things in Illustrator. Finally, I also made some coffee stain textures (which I'll be sharing this Friday) and finished the piece off.

Currently I'm enjoying focusing on the lettering and adding a more illustrative touches, like a simple roses and coffee beans here and there. I'll save my detail-crazy tendencies for other things =)

Thanks for stopping by!

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