Fuctastic has created an awesome skull illustration for the readers of Vectips. Download the illustration and check out all the intricate details! It is a great illustration to use by itself or pick through the many elements used to create the skull!

Original article: Freebie: Vector Devil-Skull Illustration

If I were forced to give up all but one image adjustment tool, I would keep curves. Hands down. The curves adjustment tool is an integral part of every professional’s knowledge base and image editing package.Even if you’ve taken a good photo, chances are it can be improved or it needs to be adjusted to work in a collage or collection. Or even to just to intensify a mood. You can always make a good thing better – and curves is a one-stop-shop way to do that.With curves you are able to:

Original article: How To Use Curves in Photoshop

Last week I decided to spend some time playing with Illustrator and trying to come up with a cool black and white artwork. My inspiration came from some skateboard deck designs which have this sort of 3D effect without using gradients or anything, and not exactly a woodcut effect either.

Original article: Playing with Vectors in Illustrator

One of the reasons that I enjoy working in Fireworks so much is the ease in which it allows you to apply basic effects to objects. In this brief video tutorial I will demonstrate how to apply a pattern overlay to a gradient in Adobe Fireworks. This technique is very useful for creating all sorts of objects in Fireworks including backgrounds, headers, banner ads, and just about any other type of design you can think of.

Original article: Quick Tip: Apply a Pattern Overlay to a Gradient in Adobe Fireworks

We recently had a reader ask us to do a post about our favorite fonts, and we thought the idea was such a good one, that we decided to take it step farther. We wanted to open this post up to a few other members of the design community to find out from them what fonts they tended to favor. Get a few more opinions and ideas shared in the post than just those that we move towards. So we asked around.

Original article: 17 Designer’s Favorite Free and Commercial Fonts

Submitting designs to galleries has always been a hectic task for designers. Do you agree with me? This post is to give you an overview on the procedure I follow to make this easy. If you have better ideas please do contribute via the comment form below.

Requirements
1. Firefox Sorry IE users!
2. InFormEnter AddOn for firefox
3. Details about your logo/website (will explain this below)

Original article: Making gallery submissions easy for designers

There’s nothing more unique to your creative talent than a series of your own doodles and sketches. Let’s use the good old doodle to represent our design services by combining quick and fun doodles with a print ready business card design. We’ll be drawing our doodles directly in Illustrator, and using the application’s print abilities to set up our business card document with the correct margins and bleed to build a complete print-ready PDF document.

Original article: Create a Fun Print-Ready Doodled Business Card Design

I have already created some tutorials about watercolor effects; however, I also want to create a workflow that is extremely simple but that produces a beautiful result. Therefore, I invented this tutorial, which uses only basic watercolor brushes, a photo, and a layer mask.

This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials I have been writing for Pixelmator and posting over at http://www.pixelmator.com/learn/

Original article: Playing with Watercolor Brushes and Masks in Pixelmator

It’s Friday once again, and we wanted to wrap up the week with a nod to our readers and followers to show them that we do appreciate their contributions to our site and our content. We want to kick things off with a small showcase of images our readers have submitted to the Arbenting Flickr group, and then follow it up with some Tweeps that follow us that we want to give you a heads up on, in case you are missing their Twitter stream.

Original article: Arbenting Flickr Showcase 03.05.10

This post is part of a weekly series showcasing inspirational vector art. Although the series showcases vector art, some work might just be vector inspired, not created completely with vector art. If you have any art suggestions, feel free to comment! For more vector art inspiration, check out the Vectips Flickr Group.

Original article: Weekly Vector Inspiration #60