Andrea Austoni is an Italian graphic designer currently living in Krakow, Poland. He specializes in icon design and illustration. He runs his blog and portfolio Cute Little Factory, which features Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials and icon, vector and wallpaper freebies. He's also the Chef at Icon Kitchen.
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Photographs are excellent tools to show you how something looks. Tracing photos to create artistic pieces however doesn’t teach you much about shape, volume, lighting, and color. Today, I would like to demonstrate an alternative way to create abstract artistic pieces using a photo merely as inspiration. We will start by choosing and simplifying its components and then proceed to apply a retro-futuristic look. Let’s get started!
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Photoshop is great for creating resizable, realistic, characters. Thanks to its basic support of vector shapes, its amazing layer styles and the endless possibilities offered by textures we can create compelling vector characters with complex shading while keeping file size to a minimum and performance to a snappy level. In this tutorial we will create a female robot made of simple vector shapes, we will use layer styles to lay down convincing metal shades and a few textures to add a final layer of realism.
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Digital graphics are largely dependent on the software used to create them. Given the clean, pixel-perfect nature of Photoshop, artworks always risk looking too perfect therefore it’s important to learn how to bring nature’s random variations into our digital creations. In this tutorial we’ll create an atmospheric poster for a dance party using the textured, retro look that’s so popular nowadays.
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In this two part tutorial on creating the “Let’s Go To Monster School!” book cover, I’ll show you a complete process from initial sketch to the final artwork, using an Illustrator to Photoshop integrated workflow. We employed Illustrator in Part 1 to trace our hand drawn sketch, lay down the shapes and define the basic colors.
Now we’ll take the vector drawing into Photoshop where we will refine the shading, add some textures, and complete the book cover with the appropriate typography. Let’s continue on with Part 2 of this series.
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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 we’ll obtain an effective, shiny icon.
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Welcome to the fifth and last tutorial in the “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons” series. We will end with an icon that depicts both a tool and a typical application of digital painting: a large display with a finished matte painting.
The screen will be drawn in a few easy steps using familiar Photoshop tools. We will then employ techniques and workflows utilized by professional matte painters to create a finished cityscape. Far from being an exercise on matte painting, this tutorial nonetheless gives us a peek into this fascinating branch of digital arts.
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For this forth installment of the “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons” series we will create a pen tablet from scratch, specifically the Wacom 12″ Cintiq tablet. This model combines touch and pressure sensitivity, which allows users to draw directly on the screen. These capabilities make it a favorite for illustrators. Let’s get to work.
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Welcome to the third tutorial in the “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons” series. In this installment we will create a paint brush icon, complete with wooden palette and paint dollops. We will employ textures, layer styles and a good sense of lighting to create a fun looking icon.
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Welcome to the second tutorial in the “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons” series. This time we’ll create a digital SLR camera, a tool digital artists often use to take pictures to create textures or for reference. We will construct a rather simple camera, but we’ll make it interesting through judicious use of brush strokes and shadows. Let’s get to it!
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This is the first tutorial in a series called “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons.” We will design five icons that depict common tools associated with digital painting: a sketchbook with pencil, a camera for taking reference pictures, a paintbrush, a pen tablet and a large screen with a complete matte painting displayed on it. Let’s get started with the sketchbook icon!
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