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12 Free Bicycle Silhouette Vectors

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:20:15 +0000

I’m pleased to release these new freebies: 12 free bicycle silhouette vectors. With the Tour de France in full speed and hitting the first serious mountain stage today there’s no better time to get your hands on these beautiful bike vectors. I’m a huge fan of the TdF and it’s great to see two riders from Luxembourg in the top 5. As you can imagine there aren’t many sport discipline where I can root for someone from my home country, let alone 2.

The set contains vectors of racing bikes, BMX, tandems as well as some bicycle pictograms. While I don’t ride a bike myself, like many designers I’m in love with the shape and geometry of bicycles. There’s something intrinsically beautiful about their clean, minimal lines.

Bicycle Silhouette Vectors Preview

All of these were created by hand in Illustrator and for the first time I could put the variable width tool introduced in CS5 to good use. Each bike is a group of different solid shapes so that you can easily alter the colour of the frame or change the spokes of the wheels. As with all the freebies released on the blog these bicycle silhouette vectors are free to use in both personal and commercial projects. Enjoy!

Download 12 Free Bicycle Silhouette Vectors

Size: 1MB, Format: EPS in zip archive

FYI Monday: Beautiful Fine Art Illustrations by Alexis Marcou

Franz Jeitz — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 07:38:15 +0000

This post is part of the For Your Inspiration Monday Series showcasing the most inspiring designs out there. Each week a new artist or design style will be presented in order to get your creative juices flowing for the upcoming week. I hope you enjoy the series.
Alexis Marcou is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator from Larisa, Greece. Most of his works are traditional fine arts pieces with a slight digital touch-up. Keeping the colour scheme very monotone really adds to the overall composition and lets the talent shine through. If you like Alexis’ beautiful art then please stop by at www.alexismarcou.com for more inspiration. Let us know which one of the pieces your favourite is.

64 Free Marker Pen Strokes Illustrator Brushes

Franz Jeitz — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:19:41 +0000

It’s with great pleasure that I release this freebies set containing 64 free Illustrator Brushes of pen marker strokes and scribbles. They’re great to give any design a more natural, hand-drawn look. All brushes are of the highest quality and you’re free to use them in both personal and commercial works. They are compatible with Illustrator versions from CS upwards. It’s worth mentioning that with brushes like these the best results can sometimes be attained by setting the stroke to 0.25px or less.

And here’s how you install them: Download and extract the .ai file from the archive. Move it to a folder of your choice (Illustrator stores all its default brushes in the directory Illustrator > Presets > Brushes). Open any illustrator document and go to the brushes palette. From the dropdown menu select: Open Brush Library > Other Library and choose the .ai file you just downloaded. That’s it. Enjoy!

Illustrator Brushes Preview:

Download Marker Pen Strokes Illustrator Brushes:

contains 1 zip archive – 64 AI Brushes, 4.4 Mb

17 Free Splatter & Drips Vectors

Franz Jeitz — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:44:03 +0000

It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve released the Hi-Res Splatter PS Brush Set. Today, with great pleasure, I release the Free Splatter & Drips Vector Set. There’s a total of 17 highly detailed splats and drips vectors in this set which comes in EPS format. Any vector editor, such as Adobe Illustrator, will be able to open them. I used brushes from both the Hi-Res Splatter PS Brush Set and the Hi-Res Messy Watercolour PS Brush Sets to create these. All vectors are solid colour silhouettes and as you all know you can scale and transform them anyway you like without loss of quality. So yes, they are perfect for print work, but look good in web designs too. As always, you may use these freebies in both commercial and personal projects without the need of attribution. I hope you like them and put them to good use.

Splatter & Drips Vector Set Preview:

contains 1 .zip file – 17 Vectors as .eps, 4.5 Mb

11 Free Scaffolding Grunge Vectors & How-To

Franz Jeitz — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:16:09 +0000

This set of 11 Free Scaffolding Grunge Vectors was specifically created with large print designs in mind, but they can be used in web projects too. It’s a common technique to slightly destroy large type in ads and other print campaigns. Using vectors for this purpose is ideal as they can be scaled to any size without loss of quality. All vectors were made using images of scaffolding which were then traced in Illustrator. I’ve also included a short tutorial on how to make the most of these excellent freebies to grunge up type.
Don’t stop there though. Let your imagination wander and get creative. As always these freebies are free for use in both personal and commercial projects.

Previews:

How to Destroy Type with Grunge Scaffolding Vectors:

While this tutorial uses Photoshop the same techniques can be used in Illustrator too. As always we start by opening a new document (white background) and using a bold font write the text “Grunge me up” in solid black.

Next step is to import one of the Scaffolding Grunge Vectors into the document. The easiest way is to simply drag it from Illustrator into Photoshop. Place it as a Smart Object on a layer above the text layer.

Using the layer styles of the Smart Object use a Color Overlay with the background’s colour (white).

Your text should now look similar to the image below. However the text is now too destroyed and barely readable for my taste.

In order to tone down the grunge effect copy the Smart Object and place it above all layers. Change the color overlay to the text’s colour (black).

Select both Smart Object layers, right-click and select “Create Clipping Mask”. This will confine the scaffolding images to only the text.

Select the top layer Smart Object (black colour overlay) and choose Free Transform (Cmd+T). Move, Rotate and Scale the Smart Object until you’re happy with the level of grunge.

This is the finished text. I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial.

Download Scaffolding Grunge Vectors:

contains 1 .eps file – 25.2 Mb

Tutorial: How to make retro/futuristic curves in 10 Steps

Franz Jeitz — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:07:35 +0000

As promised when releasing the December 08 Calendar Wallpaper I’ve written a tutorial on how to make it. This is my first ever tutorial and I hope you’ll like it. If there’s anything which is not clear please ask. I’m here to help. In order to achieve the space like scenery with the glowing lines we will use Illustrator and Photoshop. You’ll learn how to add subtle effects using textures and different blending modes. So here we go.

Step 1: Draw Lines in Illustrator

We’re starting off in Illustrator to draw the lines. Create a new document with the dimensions 1920×1200. The other settings don’t really matter since the vectors will be imported into Photoshop anyway. Draw a nice smooth curve with a 4px black stroke. Draw another curve, this time with a 1px black stroke.

Step 2: Blending the curves

Go to Object > Blend > Blend Options and set the Blending Steps to 12. Now select the two curves and hit Object > Blend > Make.

REPEAT STEP 1 and 2 to make another set of curves. Play with the settings until you’re happy with the outcome.

Step 3: Importing the curves into Photoshop

Create a new document in Photoshop. Make it 1920×1200 large and fill the background with a dark grey (I used #161616). Go to Illustrator and drag-and-drop the curves into your Photoshop document. There’s no need to expand the curves. Photoshop will do it for you.

Step 4: Applying Gradient and Glow Effect

Select one of the layers containing the curves and go to the Layer Style Menu. Start of with setting Fill to 0% (Blending Options: Custom). Apply the settings shown below. Don’t worry too much about the gradient colours at the moment. We will adjust the overall colour scheme of the design at a later step.

Right-Click on the layer in the layers palette and choose “Copy Layer Style”. Select the second curves layer and select “Paste Layer Style”. Your image should look similar to the one below.

Step 5: Copy the Curves + Composition

Select the first curves layer and copy it a couple times. Then move the individual layers like I did in the picture below. Group the layers.

Repeat Step 5 with the second curves layer. As you can see I moved the around a bit to get a nicer composition.

To get a smoother cut-off I decided to use a gradient layer mask (on the whole group). Set the gradient to black-to-white and apply it on the mask.

Step 6: Clouds and Colours

Create a new layer on top of everyting. Make sure that Foreground and Background colours are set to Black and White respectively by pressing “D”. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Set the Blending Mode to Hue and enter the Layer Style menu. Go to the gradient option and select a colour scheme you like. Set the angle to 135 degrees and make sure to set the Blend Mode to Overlay.

Step 7: Add Textures

Open 2 concrete texures and place them on top of the Background layer. I used textures from the Free Urban Texture Pack. Set one blending mode to Multiply and the other to Overlay.

Step 8: Add Circles

Create a new layer and draw some different sized circles using the Ellipse Tool. Make sure to use the “Shape Layer” mode and select “Add to shape layer” from the menu. Hold down the Shift-key while drawing to get perfect circles.

Step 9: Make Layer Masks

Cmd-Click on the circle layer it in the layers palette to make a selection, then hide the layer. Now select the first Texture layer and hit the mask button. With your selection still intact go to Selection > Inverse. Activate the second Texture layer and hit the mask button again.

Step 10: Final Image and Tweaks

That’s all there is to making a wallpaper like the one for December 08. Add a bit of text if you want to. For other colour schemes you can always add a Hue Adjustment layer.

Tutorial: How to extract a colour scheme from a photograph

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:14:16 +0000

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.

For CS3 users only: make a duplicate and convert the picture into a smart object. This way you can edit the mosaic effect without messing up the original photo.

Go to filters > Pixelate > Mosaic and vary the cell size until you’re happy with the result. In my case 113 did the job. This is it for the Photoshop part.

The next step is to import our mosaic grid into Illustrator. If you’ve got an Ai file (preferably with the same, or larger dimensions) open you can simply drag an drop the layer from Photoshop.

This is were the magic happens. Making sure you have the content selected hit “Live Trace”.

Choose the “Photo High Fidelity” Preset from the Live Trace options. The default setting of 64 for Max Colours should be enough. Change it if you used a smaller cell size for the Mosaic filter. Now hit Expand.

With the expanded mosaic still selected open the Swatches palette and from the option menu choose “Add Selected Colors”. That’s it. Now you’ve imported the colours from your intial photograph into the swatches gallery in Illustrator. Save it so you can use it for different projects.

Free Seamless Vector Pattern Set 2

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:59:57 +0000

This is the second Vector Pattern Set. The patterns are composed of basic geometric shapes and come as an Illustrator swatch file. You need to copy the .ai file to the Presets/Swatches/Patterns location inside the AI folder. Colourise, rotate or scale the patterns as you wish. The possibilities are endless and there ideal as background or overlay to make your designs that bit more interesting.

Download Pattern Set 2:

zip file includes 1 .ai pattern swatch file for AI CS and higher.