Tutorials discovered this week.

Bittbox has published a great tutorial on Complex Circular Design Techniques in Illustrator

VectorTuts has published Seven Helpful Techniques that Every Adobe Illustrator Artist Should Know. These tips by Jonathan are very helpful

Over on Brusheazy thre are some photoshop brushes in the shape of labels free to download

Over on High Resolution textures there are 7 high quality textures of drapery created by Danny C Boyce

Jared Rhizor of Nettuts has written a tutorial on how to Create a Photo Gallery with MooTools The tutorial is well written and covers a complex process. The interface produced allows browsing between thumbnails and the original-size images with ease. However it not dynamic which means all thumbnails are loaded when the gallery loads making it suitable for about 20-30 images only.

 

More Photoshop and Illustrator freebies

Dot Pattern Art Brush in Adobe Illustrator is a illustrated tutorial on creating a brush

Spoongraphics wrote this roundup of free ornamental, floral, swirly and curly graphics on the web

Vector Illustration: 60+ Illustrator Tutorials, Tips and Best Practices is what it says it is. There are some great tutorials in this list and I must admit to not yet checking them all out.

Tutorial Blog has featured Color Manipulation in Illustrator

Over on WebResources depot there is a listing of 64 Beautiful And Free Nature Brush Sets And Vectors

On the DZine Blog there are 27 Best Photoshop Web Layout Design Tutorials to Design Decent Web Layouts

 

Photoshop and Illustrator Goodies

Vectips has published a tutorial on how to create your own brushes in Illustrator

Bittbox has been drawing decorative elements and released two sets of hand drawn ornaments as EPS or SVG files. Also on Bittbox is an Illustrator CS3 tip on how to load brush libraries faster and a tutorial on how to make a grungy paper texture from scratch

Also there are some free acrylic Photoshop brushes from Shoreways

There is a paisley Photoshop brush and a handwriting brush available from brusheezy.com

Stephanie of Obsidian Dawn had released some brushes of Floral Patterns to be used in conjunction with her Flower Vectors Photoshop Brushes set. Also dont miss her Celtic Vector brushes

Vector tuts is anew vector and Illustrator tutorial site

 

Top Tut points to top tutorials

I am always scouting about reading tutorials. In part it is because I teach and like to point students to resources but in part I just enjoy discovering good well written and illustrated tutorials. I recently added TopTut.com to my reader as they constantly dig out good tutorials. They describe themselves as being dedicated to web development and design, but have a look at Photoshop tutorials category and their most popular posts for a bit of reading.

 

Sample chapters on Photoshop and Illustrator

Peachpit often provide sample chapters of their books. The site houses such items as a sample chapter on using the Bridge in CS3 and the Photoshop Reference Guide by Matt Kloskowski houses a number of video tutorials. Unlock the True Power of Illustrator by Mastering Vectors written by Mordy Golding focuses on the pen tool. These are a few of the resources to be found at Peachpit so do explore a little particularly the blog

 

Adobe TV

If you enjoy learning software via video tutorials Adobe TV should be just your thing as you can learn by seeing a demonstration and following along. Needless to say presenters are experts from Adobe covering the company products

You will need Adobe® Flash® Player 9 and broadband to view them. However they can also be viewed in the Adobe Media Player. Since episodes are downloaded to your desktop this means those on slower connections can view the videos.

 

Dreamweaver Tutorials online

Adobe has a number of Dreamweaver tutorials and support materials on their site. Some of the material is good but students should be aware that Adobe houses tutorials for earlier versions of the software too.

How to Create a Website with Dreamweaver CS3 (Part 1) from Christopher Heng is another Dreamweaver tutorial which shows you how to set up a working website with multiple pages, including a main page, a feedback form, an About Us page, and a Site Map.

Enthos web has a Free Dreamweaver Tutorial section which is worth checking out

Vineyar Designs has provided some Dreamweaver CS 3 tutorials including setting up your site

Smashing magazine put together a huge list of Dreamweaver tutorials

Guides and Tutorials.com have a number of CS3 tutorials

 

More Photoshop and Illustrator goodies

Both Photoshop and Illustrator enable you to record a series of actions that you may constantly repeat. After recording these steps you can play them back over other other images. They are extremely useful for any task that you have to do over and over again. These 124 Free Photoshop Actions to Boost Your Designs will give you an idea of what is possible

You can download the keyboard shortcuts from the links in Increase your productivity – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver keyboard shortcuts as it contains all the keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Photoshop CS3, CS2, CS, 7, Adobe Illustrator CS3, CS2 and Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, both Windows and Mac versions.

Bittbox has released some free ink/water Illustrator brushes and has done a round up of 16 Incredibly Detailed, Useful (and free) Dingbat Fonts

How to Create Line Brushes in Illustrator demonstrates the process of creating different types of brushes

All about views and the art board in Illustrator explains the various viewing options in Illustrator

“Free Transform” Tool Distorting paths into perspective using Adobe Illustrator’s “Free Transform” tool

This tutorial shows you how crop in Illustrator and work with Crop Area

Obsidian Dawn has produced a tutorial that shows you how to create a seamless texture in Photoshop.

Introduction to Live Paint by Stian Bakkane is a quick introduction and covers the basics of the Live Paint tool in Illustrator.

 

Art Demonstrations online

For anyone who is interested in developing their drawing skills pay a visit to ArtDemonstrations.com as the site is a blog in which the author collates together links to tutorials, instructional material and art demonstrations on the web.

 

More Photoshop and Illustrator goodies

Introduction to the photoshop layout is a video tutorial that is ideal for beginners to Photoshop introducing the user interface to those who are new to the program.

Stephanie of Obsidian Dawn has released some lovely Texture brushes hat can be used in Photoshop. They are created to be used as brushes ie actually painted into an image so the assumption is that you enjoy drawing. Its not quite the same a squishing paint about or getting mucky with pastels but almost as much fun! If you are a heavy user of Photoshop’s base texture brushes you will enjoy these.

Ladyvictoire has creates some Script brushes for Photoshop for Brusheezy
Diane Miller has written a tutorial on Changing Colors Selectively in Adobe Photoshop CS3