There’re by now quite many sites offering ways to browse and create custom color palettes online. ColourLovers, Colorcombos or Kuler – just to name a few. Wear palettes is a service which I’ve been using for a rather long time now that offers similar results by means of a different approach: Instead of listing user-contributed palettes, the author examines pictures from the well-known style-blog “The Sartorialist” and identifies the main colours of the protagonists’ clothes.

What I like most about this idea is that I, in addition to finding a nice color palette, can just as well browse through interesting clothes or style combinations.

Wear Palettes.

The Blender Foundation just released the newest Version of the popular and very powerful open source 3d Modeller “Blender 3D”. The work on their second open source movie “Big Buck Bunny” has resulted in a new version with a greatly improved feature set. There’s a new “Hair and Fur” System, with astonishing capabilities, a completely rewritten Particle system, Cloth Simulation, improved Render Baking, Approximate Ambient Occlusion (awesome speed & quality), raytraced soft shaows, and much much more. So if you’re into 3D, or just want to experiment with it, you should definately try Blender, since it’s not only free but also very competetive. 

Drerek Yu wrote a usefull article that describes how to create pixelart. His tutorial consists out of 10 steps ranging from tools over shadnig to anti-aliasing. It’s quite interesting, Derek Writes:

Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became rather handy with it, and started to see it more as “real” art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular for gaming and illustration. You can even find it in print magazines, like Wired and Electronic Gaming Monthly!

This pixel tutorial was created many years ago to teach people the basic concepts behind pixel art, but I’ve streamlined it a lot since its first incarnation. There are other pixel tutorials around, but I find them to be overly complicated and too wordy. Pixel art is not a science. You will never have to calculate a vector when doing pixel art.

Derek Yu – Pixelart Tutorial

Here are even more Photoshop tutorials and brushes for your pleasure; Happy layouting

Free Photoshop Brushes Resources

Tutorials are like cakes; as soon as you tried some you want to have more. So if you, once again, need your daily fix, but lack a page with fresh tutorials, add FOTOFECTS to your linklist. The more, the better eh :)

http://fotofects.com/