Ideas and Projects!

     Hey everyone! I know I have not been blogging over the past week, and I have generally moved away from the topic of Graphic Design. So I come to you today with a brand new page about ideas.

     Ideas are the key to a successful and meaningful image, whether they come from you or someone else. Often I find myself at a choice of making a picture or watching television. My choice is usually television because I have no ideas for graphic design. This is terrible because as a student I want to become better at Photoshop and without practicing, that won't happen. So I have created a brand new page for my blog with all sorts of ideas and projects. I hope you enjoy some of the ideas because they are very fun to think up. Check out the new page and I would love to hear feedback and see some of the images you have created from them.

Shading Tutorials!

Ok, now after all these days you have been waiting, I am going to post some tutorials. These tutorials are for learning shading for digital painting. I have always struggled here and finally found some decent tutorials. They are mainly for photoshop but most, if not all f the tools used, are available in other programs. So enjoy, I hope they help you as much as the helped me.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm - This is a detailed description for everything shading, it is a great place to start but it is very extensive. Don't let this tutorial scare you.

http://www.cellesriaart.com/resources/basic-blending/ - This is an overview of blending techniques if you are struggling with how to blend your shading

http://www.melissaevans.com/tutorials/pencil-sketch-to-smooth-digital-shading - This is a tutorial on how to turn pencil sketches into digital paintings. I found this very unique and helpful if you are better at traditional drawing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxO8u-loAEc - This is a tutorial on how to shade a sphere

Soon I will have some tutorials on how to shade people because I find that very helpful.

i made these with some shading help. The orb is from the YouTube tutorial 

Latest and Greatest

Hey everyone surprise its me! Over the weekend I had a fantastic experience of learning how to shade people, It is only a brief start and with all the flaws, I am still proud. I have been trying to learn how to shade people for quite some time. Oh, keep in mind this image is not meant to look completely realistic. Enjoy
I will have several shading tutorials up in a moment

oh and the hair was just a last minute effort

I forgot eyebrows! that's what was missing. I will fix that.

Thought I would share a quick painting that i found while browsing through old files

Beginning Photoshop

Hey Everyone! I heard via email that some people were interested in beginning Photoshop tutorials and where to start with that if you allready own Photoshop. Well, today I found a great tutorial for beginning and learning the tools of Photoshop.  So here it is:


http://mashable.com/2010/08/12/12-beginner-tutorials-for-getting-started-with-photoshop/

enjoy! and any sugestions on things you want to learn or see here are welcome!

For New Graphic Designers

This Blog really needs a jump start so I will start with the point of this blog! Right now I will be doing a different graphic design learning topic each month, most of the tutorials if not all of them, will be based off photoshop but If you want you can request a different type of program such as Gimp or Illustratior or other things like that. I have not picked the first topic yet but I will soon. For newcomers to graphics, read below to start. For older graphic designers, I will start posting tutorial links and other fun stuff asap!

- If you are brand new to graphic design and do not have a program to work off, I can get you started on where to go and how to learn. First, If you have a PC which many people do, you have this great free program called "Paint" which is a great place to start digital drawing. If you are more interested in web design and photo-mainpulation I strongly suggest a free downloadable program for both Mac and PC called Gimp. Gimp is basically a downgraded free version of Photoshop. Due to the fact that Photoshop is several hundreds of dollars, Gimp has several flaws and errors but is a fantastic way  to start graphic design. If you allready have a program like Photoshop than thats great and you can strt with it but if you do not have a program allready on your computer I HIGHLY suggest that you do not go out and buy one right away, Graphic design is certainly not for everyon but there is a chance it may be for you like it was for me. On a personal note, I started graphic design on Gimp and later bought Photoshop. If you plan to buy photoshop and are a student, make sure to ask for the student discount. Here are some helpfull Links for launching into the world of graphic design. I will also post the link to the GIMP download. (always make sure you are on an official website for downloads, if you download from a false website it may give yourr computer a virus.)

-Where to download Gimp for Mac or Windows
http://www.gimp.org/

- Downloading instructions to beginning project tutorials
http://www.vtc.com/products/GIMP-2.6-Tutorials.htm

-Gimp tutorials! provided by gimp, great place to start after instilation
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

-Microsoft Paint (ms paint) the basics and where to start
http://www.lkwdpl.org/classes/MSPaint/paint.html

I hope that launches you off to the incredible world of Graphic Design!