I've had a few friends tell me they'd like to look over my shoulder when I did a pen tool design. Maybe my tutorial wasn't as clear as it needed to be. I've done a little screencast using JING, a free screen capture and annotation tool from TechSmith. The screencast is limited to five minutes, so I had to hurry - but I've gone through the entire process. You can pause and try, or watch it as many times as it takes to get the concept. The screencast is a flash video. I hope you find it helpful. Here's the link...

[link]

Please feel free to comment and let me know if it worked for you.

Nathan

I've been learning how to do CSS (I'm a complete novice at this at the moment - but I'm a few steps further than I was the other day when I started ) I've found a couple of websites I'd like to share with you that let you take an image, and the site will create a color palette (complete with the hex color codes you need) from any image you choose. Both sites will offer both vibrant and less vibrant palettes. Those of you into CSS will enjoy these I think...

[link]
Degraeve.com - color palette generator

[link]
Color Hunter

Go give them a try.

Nathan

I have been having fun with a couple of websites recently, ones that allow me to look at color schemes. The first one is called ColorCombos.com

[link]

The other one is a search engine that searches FLICKR images by color combinations that you choose. It's called the multi-color search lab...

[link]

Another interesting site lets you turn a photo into a knitting pattern. Although I've never knitted, the results look interesting and stimulate some ideas. For those of you who do knit, you might really enjoy this one...

[link]

An artist whose wallpapers have really caught my attention lately created a whole series of Photoshop tutorials that are teaching me some new techniques (and I've been doing Photoshop for a long time). The site is VladStudio. Have a look at these tutorials...

[link]

And totally off-topic, but so cool - Stellarium. Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go! 260 million stars in the database. Constellations for eleven different cultures, too.

Have a most wonderful, marvelous, great day, my friends!!!!

Nathan

A friend of mine just shared a set of GIMP scripts that will give you the following Photoshop layer effects in GIMP...

* Drop Shadow
* Inner Shadow
* Outer Glow
* Inner Glow
* Bevel and Emboss
* Satin
* Color Overlay
* Gradient Overlay
* Pattern Overlay
* Stroke

Some effects can have contours (a.k.a. curves) and noise added to them. Effects can either be applied on a separate layer, or be merged into the active layer (which in some cases gives better results).

Tested with GIMP 2.4.2.

Here's the link - [link]

Hi! If you're looking for some special Valentine font, or actually any nice looking font, check out the addresses below... (They're free)

Specialty Fonts - [link]

1001 Free Fonts - [link]

Acid Fonts - [link]

Download Free Fonts - [link]

Another 1001 Free Fonts - [link]

Also, you need to have a look at DaFont.com - [link]