20 Amazing Digital Artists to Follow on Behance

Anyone with an interest in design, illustration or digital art knows the Behance Network is the place to go to find all kinds of amazing artworks.

This roundup pulls together a collection of the site’s most popular and a few of my personal favorite artists and designers, who each produce high quality and awe-inspiring work.

Having the latest projects from these artists appear in your news stream is sure to keep your creative fire burning.

{by SpoonGraphics}

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Complex Circular Design Techniques

Creating intricate circular designs and patterns may look difficult because the shapes can be very complicated, but you will be surprised at just how easy making these shapes can be.

I will go over some neat tricks, tools, techniques, and settings that will have you pumping out perfect circular designs in no time using Illustrator.

{by Bittbox}

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Over 550 Photoshop Brush Packs Free for Commercial Use

This article was originally posted on August 26, 2008. This is one of our two most popular posts of all time on the blog so we wanted to go through it and make sure it was still up to date.

There have been some changes, a handful of people had changed their licenses and some were gone all together. There are also quite a few new additions that we hope you’ll find useful.

As a side note, we no longer know how many packs are included so we can’t guarantee the 550+ number.

{by Arbent}

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5 Advanced Google Tricks to Help You Become a Better Web Designer

You can use some simple Google tools in very creative ways, as well as use some more advanced ones to:

• find high-quality tutorials for any web design software tool, and find them easier and faster
• find decent alternatives for the current web design software you’re using
• search for what Spanish (or ) web designers are talking about

…and much more!

You’ll learn all of this in the text below. I’ll use specific examples to illustrate my points, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use your own examples when you understand the points. So let’s get started, shall we?

{by 1stWebDesigner}

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Cardboard: Texture Pack

Here is an assortment of cardboard textures that you can freely download and use in your projects.

Each image has a dimension of 1944×2896px.

Using the cardboard textures is permitted on commercial and personal projects with no limitations. The only thing you can’t do is redistribute the files and the texture pack without prior consent from Design Instruct.

{by DesignInstruct}

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Free Ecological Vector Design Elements

Happy Earth Day, earthlings!

To celebrate Earth Day we are giving away some eco design elements: trees, leaves, suns, recycle symbols etc.

Go green!

{by Snap2Objects}

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Adobe Fireworks Tutorial - Creating Orbs

The Simple Orbs Tutorial is a very simple technique, yet it could add some dramatic touches to your design.

It is just one layer object but you can replicate it over and over, and change the sizes.

{by Blue2x}

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Abstract website backgrounds, HTML and CSS templates

If you are planning to redesign your website or make a new one, these five web backgrounds might help you with the design idea.

What you get in the package? Web ready (optimized) images with HTML and CSS codes.

{by PsdGraphics}

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Web 2.0 Gradients

Gradients are one of the most important aspects to be considered while designing a Web 2.0 Site. Even a simple button is of a gradient. So I decided to make some cool set of Gradients and put them together in an Adobe Photoshop Gradient file (.grd).

These gradients are fully scalable, what i mean here is its not an image or so.. just create a shape and apply the gradient - As simple as that. You could create Logos, Backgrounds, Tabs, Buttons, Wallpapers, Toolbars and all sorts of stuff…

{by DezinerFolio}

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Natural Leaves & Bushes

One more set of leaves created by Ann (VectorLady.com).

Vector clip art of 70+ natural like leaves, bushes and flowers, silhouettes created by photo tracing, plus hand editing of final images.

All that floral nature elements are very eye catching designs and today they can be found in any design sphere: posters, flyers, t-shirt designs, business cards; web-design: banners, web sites, logotypes; commercial graphics or wallpaper.

Set includes vector version for Adobe Illustrator CS (*.ai) and Adobe Photoshop CS (*.csh)

{by All-Silhouettes}

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Grunge Text Effect in Illustrator

In this tutorial we will make a grunge text effect like in a logo of Getaway TV series.

You can find the original Getaway logo here: www.thegetaway.co.uk

{by DesignSpice}

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People in Couples

New mega set of people silhouettes - People in Couples.

56 detailed outlines of girls and men, parents with their children, business partners and lovers, friends and relatives. Also you can find some romantic couples, easy to create eye catching love images and illustrations for Valentine’s day.

{by All-Silhouettes}

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17 Fantastic Uses of Shadow to Enhance Photographic Composition

A strong shadow can add great effect to a photograph.

As a compositional element that is used to draw the eye, however, a shadow can be a defining feature of an entire image.

We think this collection of images demonstrates how a shadow can be used to great effect in drawing the eye.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

{by LightStalking}

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Weekly Download: Effects for Adobe Illustrator, Series 2

I get asked all the time how to create bevels in Adobe Illustrator.

There are two answers for this: use the 3D filter, in which case you're limited to flat surfaces, or fudge it by combining multiple instances of your graphic, in which case you're stuck spending too much time on a simple effect that's not easily repeatable.

So I've decided to dip into my shallow reservoir of programming knowledge to present you with a few preset bevel filters that will hopefully get you through some simple tasks that require resolution-independent, Photoshop-style bevels.

{by CorporateMediaNews}

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How To Install & Use The Photoshop Frames & Borders Free Brush Set

This tutorial will walk you through installing and using the Frames & Borders Free Brush Set (zip/6.5MB) by Stephanie of Obsidian Dawn. It also includes tips on using specific brushes from the set to insure that they come out their best!

You'll find a description of each of the 28 brushes at the end of this tutorial.

If you are familiar with how to install and use Photoshop brushes already, skip down to the "Using the Brushes" section.

{by PhotoshopSupport}

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Free Vectors

Welcome to Mad Media Monkey´s Free Vectors Section.

Our online gallery of free to use vector graphics are for personal use and most of them can be used commercially.

If you choose to use a vector, please leave a comment
so we know what types of vectors you like. Also, show support by visiting our contributors site.

{by MadMediaMonkey}

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Retouching Photos with Background Textures

Our Tip #3 deals with line drawings and how to create a watercolor from them using Photoshop.

In this installment, we will take a photograph, and overlay textures to create a "watercolor". 

To keep the tutorial simple, I've kept the layers and therefore the effect to a minimum.

Having said that, sometimes subtle effects are more impressive than ones that  are overwhelming.

{by WetzelandCompany}

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Leather: Texture Pack

In this exclusive Design Instruct freebie, you will be able to avail of some high-resolution and large-dimension leather textures that you can use in your personal and commercial work.

The sizes range from 1496px to 2000px in width. There are a variety of leather textures for you to enjoy, use, and choose from. The file format of the images is JPG.

{by DesignInstruct}

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80 Best-Of Adobe Illustrator Tutorials, Brushes, .EPSs and Resources

For months, we have been bookmarking interesting, useful and creative Adobe Illustrator tutorials and Resources, so you can now rest assured that you will have the necessary tools to get the job done.

Due to this phenomenally vast amount of vector packs, brushes, patterns available, you can now add dirt, rust, floral effect, swirls, mold, oil stains in your artwork and to give it any look you want.

So in today’s post, you’ll find an assortment of top-notch tutorials, brushes, patterns, vector packs, tips & tricks and .EPS downloadable files that others have freely contributed to the design community.

{by Noupe}

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Free acrylic PS brushes

Well. They’re finally here.

The free acrylic PS brushes I mentioned the other day. I had a blast putting these together so I hope you will enjoy using them.

Here’s the deal. These are absolutely free for personal or commercial use, though I would greatly appreciate it if you gave me credit for these brushes by referencing this post and/or http://www.theshoreways.com.

  

{by TheShoreWays}

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Free Vectors: Flowers

I’ve got some new vectors for everyone.

I’ve been playing around with a new Wacom tablet for a few days now (still experimenting) but I’d like to share some of my first creations with everyone.

Hope you can put ‘em to good use ;) Download After the Jump. (EPS & SVG)

{by Bittbox}

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Lava Rock: Texture Pack

This is a collection of free textures of lava rock for you to enjoy.

There are 12 high-resolution images available in this Design Instruct exclusive.

They are available for personal and commercial use in your work, but please do not redistribute this pack without obtaining consent first.

The image files are 2000×3008px in size.

{by DesignInstruct}

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Rapid Fire #4: Image Editing Tricks Part I

This dual serving of Rapid Fire demonstrates some basic image compositing techniques in Adobe® Fireworks®.

This is the first of two parts, and will serve as a simple intro showing how to create and match perspectives using the Distort Tool. 

And what better example than putting a screenshot over an empty screen?

{by BrownBatteryStudios}

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6 Vintage Emblems

Well I hope you are not tired of this wave of vintage vectors my beloved readers. Because as you can see here comes more!

This time 6 Vector emblems from, yeah you are right, the same old poetry book. I am kind of ripping all the illustrations there are so many and I find then really beautiful.

I hope you enjoy them as well. :)

{by Snap2Objects}

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Get More-Natural Adjustments with the Illustrator “Reshape” Tool

A hidden gem in my opinion, Illustrator’s “Reshape” tool can come in very handy in a variety of situations.

In a nutshell, the Reshape tool allows you to drag a single point on a path and it tries to retain the overall shape of the entire path, while you only move the one anchor point.

What? I’ll explain below.

{by BittBox}

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Create an Abstract Composition in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to create an abstract composition using rendered images and light effects.

As you can see from the final result preview we will create a mystical and magical effect.

In this tutorial we will use plenty of Photoshop tools, and we also will use another Adobe product - Cinema 4D, but if you don't have Cinema 4D that's ok, you will be able do all rest steps of this tutorial.

I hope you will learn some new tricks. So, let's move forward and start this tutorial.

{by PSDeluxe}

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Concrete/Brick Blocks: Texture Pack

There are concrete textures. Then there are brick textures. However, you rarely find both in one texture pack! That’s right, that’s how we do it at Design Instruct! There are 8 large-scale images in this texture pack, and each are up to 2000×3008px in dimension.

I found these concrete block pillars with brick pieces shoved in between the mortar. How amazing is that? I thought it was neat-o.

Enjoy! Use them for personal and commercial works.

{by DesignInstruct}

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