In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will be able to distinguish how Illustrator works with Live Trace and with the Pen Tool. Two different results from the same image, the first close to hand-drawing, the second more of a cartoon style. First you’ll need to know how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don’t worry! You can download her drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator.
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Today’s post features a collection of unique desktop wallpapers for February 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions, with and without a calendar, and can be downloaded for free. Created by designers and artists from across the globe, they are just waiting to give your desktop a makeover and provide you with some fresh inspiration. Now you only need to decide which one will accompany you through the month — and that won’t be easy given all the creative ideas the community has come up with. A big thank-you to everyone who participated!
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The new year is an occasion to start things fresh, to rethink current practices and habits. So why not start small? Clean up your desktop and give it an inspiring new background. We might have something for you: desktop wallpapers created by artists and designers from across the globe as a part of our monthly desktop wallpapers challenge.
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In 2010, back in the time when we started searching for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine, we launched the monthly wallpaper series. Since then, we’ve had remarkable desktop wallpapers designed by various artists from all around the globe. It would be our pleasure, dear readers, for you to share your artworks with all of us and we heartily welcome you to join in the monthly wallpaper submissions here on Smashing Magazine! Feel free to design bold, intriguing, crazy, personal, but creative, unusual and absolutely stunning wallpapers.
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Today we are glad to release a beautiful set of icons designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko from Minsk, Belarus, and released for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all of them for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything! As long as you don’t resell bundles of the illustrations, you can use the illustrations for anything you need. A sincere thank you to NastiFunny (Anastasia Kolisnichenko) for releasing the illustrations.
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This post features artwork for December 2015. Each month, we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting and inspiring desktop wallpapers. And well, we are very thankful to everyone who tickles their creativity and contributes to this challenge every month. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. Now it’s up to you to decide: which one will deck your desktop this month? All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper.
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Today, we’re happy to release the Voyage Icon Set, a set of 40 free icons designed and created by Print Express and is free to use in private as well as commercial projects. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms isn’t cool. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word about the freebie.
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Each month we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative wallpapers. And, well, it wasn’t any different this time around. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. This is why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. A big thank you to all designers for their participation
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Changing your workflow can be a real challenge if you don’t know where to start or understand how to embark on the change. Fabio Benedetti has met with many designers (graphic, interaction, UI, etc.) who stick to old software because they are familiar and in their comfort zone, or because they are too scared to take the “leap of faith” and try something new, but change, as scary as it may be, most of the time is a good thing — first, because you learn how to do new things and, secondly, because feeling challenged and getting out of our comfort zone every once in a while is beneficial.
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Since seven years, we challenge the design community to participate in our wallpaper mission and each month designers and artists from across the globe enthusiastically contribute their work to it. The result is a unique mix of ideas and styles, eye candy that is bound to cater for new idea sparks. This post features desktop wallpapers for October 2015. We are very thankful to everyone who took the challenge and shared their designs with us this month.
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