I often go into large music stores to see what new music has emerged. Although online stores might be more convenient I enjoy flicking through CDs and vynils. Every now and then a particularly appealing album cover draws my attention. I might know the band and like their music, or not. Anyways, yesterday was such a day where i spent about an hour browsing through album covers seeking that eye-catching artwork. I got lucky and found a few real gems which I want to share with you. Unfortunately it wasn’t easy to find good quality pictures of the artworks. So please forgive me for some pixelated pictures.
Good news first. I passed all of this year’s exams and will start my MSci Physics in September at UCL. Until then I’ve got all the time to invest myself into the world of fudgegraphics. Also, I bought the latest issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine this afternoon and while flicking through it I discovered this:
So Advanced Photoshop have compiled a list of the best freebie-websites out there including MyPhotoshopBrushes. My Tea Stains brush set (2nd in the first row) was lucky enough to have made it into the screencap. I’m really excited about this indirect advertising. Also I discovered that my brushes got rated an excellent 5.7/6. Whoop Whoop.
I was wasting some time on youtube today and stumbled upon some old and new music videos that are quite unusual. The music isn’t always my cup of tea, but the videos itself are amazing. You probably know some of them, well they’re so good that you can watch them over and over again.
Hugo fragrances has launched a design contest a couple months back and right now the 3rd round of 4 is open for submissions until the 5th of July. The theme of round 3 is “City Sounds”. In each round the top 10 designs get 500$ each. I’d say that is a good reason to participate. Even if you’re new to design you can still enter. The Hugo Create Site has a design generater which allows you to use background templates and design elements such as swirls and arrows to complete your entry. Go ahead and play with it. It’s good fun and inspires at the same time. Obviously the quality ranges from low to high. These are some of my favourite entries.
I’ve just got an e-mail to notify me that the new release of mozilla’s browser, firefox 3, is officially out. To make the release even more special they aim to set a new world record for most downloads in 24 hours. You can download firefox 3 from spreadfirefox.com (which isn’t working right no due to the high demand). Let’s hope all my plugins still work once I can get my hands on it.
*UPDATE*
Finally I’ve managed to update to the new firefox and it looks really nice. I especially like how it takes on that Mac OSX look. It did mess up my bookmarks though a bit by losing some of them. I’m happy to have made the switch though and can’t wait to discover all the new features. The only downside to it is that the firebug plugin is not (yet) compatible.
I’ve just updated my flickr account with 21 free textures for you to download. All photos were taken on Saturday in London. It wasn’t planned or anything. As a matter of fact I went to the Tate Modern Museum to take the “Street Art” tour. There are supposed to be about 15 artworks to be seen in the streets surrounding the gallery. Either I’m blind, can’t read a map or most of the artwork have already dissapeared, cause I only discovered like 3 or 4. I was really excited about this “exhibition” but ended up dissapointed. Anyways, it wasn’t all for nothing. Since I got my camera with me I used the time to shoot some grunge textures which I want to share with you. Rather than putting them in a zip file I organized them in a flickr set so that you can download the individual textures you like. Enjoy!
Erik Soderquist is 23 years old, comes from Tacoma Washington where he still lives and I would call him an all round artist. One of his designs has been featured in the CMYK Lovers post on fudgegraphics. Erik tries himself at retro grunge and photography with success. This is only a small selection of his portfolio. There’s much more to be seen on deviantArt. The most fascinating thing is to see his progress. Can’t wait to see new material.
Today I picked up on a neat little trick on how to extract a colour palette from a photograph. Imagine you stumble upon a gorgeous photo (or piece of digital art) which has this special colour scheme. You could use the eyedropper tool to extract each colour individually but there’s a slicker way of doing it. This tutorial teaches you how to convert a photo into a fully functional colour swatch palette using photoshop and illustrator.
this is the photograph I got from flickr with nice warm colours which I want to use in a vector design. The first step is to open it in Photoshop. Read more »
