Stunning vector images at Designious

In a previous post I linked to sites where you can buy and sell vector images. Those sites have big collections of vector images made by many different artists, but this means that the quality of the illustrations are not always the best. But there are also sites dedicated exclusively to vector images made by one person, team, or company. Designious is one such site, and they have a huge selection of beautiful vectors to choose from.

Designious sells dozens of $15 themed packs with many vector images in each one. The categories include Floral, People, Nature, Buildings, Skulls, Scrolls, Halftones & Grunges, Wings, and more. These packs are also available in Mega Packs and Giga Packs, which are great if you want to buy multiple normal packs, because you can get them for half price! They also have dozens of striking T-shirt designs for $10 each.

If you want to try before you buy, you can go to their free downloads page, where you can find free vector packs, T-shirt designs, icons, and some stunning illustrations.

My favorite floral design is "Floral vector pack 19", which is filled with beautiful vines and flowers! Most of them are meant to be used as abstract silhouettes, but you can still color the vines and flowers separately with a little more work. Just copy and paste your image, and remove the part of the drawing you don't need (for example everything except a flower). Repeat until you have separate images for each part you want to give a separate color to.

I have also tried the "Cartoon girls vector pack", which contains 17 vector images of women in different poses, with different hair and clothes, and of different nationalities. My first thought when I saw them was that they would be perfect to use in personal websites and blog designs! I really love using vectors instead of bitmap images, because it's so much easier to change the colors to my liking. I had great fun changing the colors of their hair, skin, clothes, and even their make-up! Try doing that so easily in Photoshop :P

Users who don't have Illustrator might have some problems with the parts of the images that are colored with gradients - I use VectorDesigner, and some of the girls from this pack were missing clothing or hair! :P Luckily I also have ZeusDraw, and was able to get around this problem by importing the EPS file as a PDF, and then converting the PDF to objects. But if you're lucky enough to have Illustrator, you shouldn't have any problems ;)

Browsing through the Designious vector packs has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new designs, and I can't wait to get started! :D

Cooliris finally available for Safari!

Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is finally available again for Safari users! Cooliris is a browser plugin (currently available for Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer) that enables you to browse or search for images and video via a beautiful interface. The results are shown on a 3D wall that you can scroll around on and zoom-in on.

Supported sites include Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, SmugMug, Google, Yahoo, deviantART, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, and MySpace. For the full list click here. It is also possible to enable Cooliris on your own website or blog.

I have been waiting a long time for Cooliris to be compatible with the new version of Safari, and now that it has been released I am suitably impressed. The images don't completely load until you click on them, so when you select an image to enlarge it's a bit blurry at first, but the loading time is quite fast - and I have a terrible connection! It also considerably speeds up image browsing and searching, as there's no need to load a new page after every few images, and it only fully loads the images that you are interested in.

To see everything Cooliris can do, just hop over to Cooliris.com, and watch the introductory video. You need to see it in action to fully understand how great it is! ;)

Prizes I won in June 2008

To everyone who never enters contests because they don't think they'll win: if you don't enter, you can be sure you won't win! Since I started my blog I've run across many contests with great prizes, and often the only requirement to enter is subscribing to the blog via email! I haven't won any of the BIG prizes yet, but I have won a ton of Entrecard points and quite a few high quality WordPress themes.

I'd like to send out a big thank you to all the sites that held these contests, and to all the sponsors that donated the prizes! Here's what I've won since about the beginning of June, when I started entering these contests:

• PhotoshopStar contest
  Blog Perfume - Blubs theme
• Entreblast - 554 EC
• BloggerJesse - 2050 EC
• WPThemeDesigner contest
  WPelements - TV.Elements theme
• Blog Premiere contest
  PowerTheme - MagPress theme
  PremiumThemes - Ecstasy theme
• Rockfuse - 3100 EC

Thanks to all of you, I really appreciate the prizes! As you can see, I'm using the Blubs theme on Bits and Pixels, and I'll be using the two themes I won in the Blog Premiere contest on blogs I'll be opening soon (subscribe to my RSS feed to stay updated!). The TV.Elements theme, on the other hand, will have to wait a while before I can use it - I have some great ideas for a video blog, but I'll need a camcorder first! :P

The Entrecard credits will also be very useful for promoting Bits and Pixels and my other new blogs once they're up and running. I have also donated 1000 EC to Entreblast's "Summer Credit Splash" contest that will be starting soon, with at least 20,000 EC up for grabs!

Where to buy and sell vector illustrations

You probably know that there are sites in which you can buy and sell stock photos, but did you know there are also sites in which you can buy and sell vector illustrations? There aren't as many as the stock photo sites, but there are still a lot of great illustrations available.

Must-have filters and plugins for graphic applications

Here is a list of great filters and Color Picker plugins that work in multiple applications, including Pixelmator and VectorDesigner. The essential ones are free, so you can power up your favorite graphic apps without having to spend a cent!

PhotoshopStar giveaway

PhotoshopStar is celebrating their 2nd birthday by giving away some great prizes - to enter just leave a comment here!

Pixelmator tutorials

Last updated: 3 June 2008

Pixelmator is a relatively new but very promising image editing application. You can click here to read the Pixelmator user manual, or you can check out the following links to tutorials I have found:

Text & image tutorials

My tutorials:
Converting .png brushes for use in Pixelmator
Converting Photoshop .abr brushes to .png using Gimp
Batch converting brushes for Pixelmator

Wooster's tutorials:
Blueprint and Sketches
Reflection and Gloss
Disco Effect
Using the Color Picker
Using Automator with Pixelmator
Manga Scanlation

Other tutorials:
Abduzeedo.com

Video tutorials

Sebastiaan's tutorials:
Creating a Graduated Neutral Density filter
Removing red eyes
3 ways to sharpen images
Making a realistic drop of water
Creating rounded corners and a reflection
Creating a Badge

Other video tutorials:
JustinSeeley.com
Bernskiold.com
ScreenCastsOnline.com
Expert Village
Smokey's Video Tutorials
Agupoli on YouTube (Spanish)

The sites in the "Other tutorials" and "Other video tutorials" categories have links to their various tutorials on their own sites.

Abduzeedo has tutorials for creating some stunning effects, but unfortunately they are all missing some steps, and the author doesn't seem to answer questions in the comments. You can still learn new things by following the tutorials though, even if you aren't able to exactly replicate the effects.

The video tutorials mostly just walk you through basic features of Pixelmator, but check through them to see if there's anything useful to you.

If anyone knows where to find any other Pixelmator tutorials, please leave a comment! ;)