I’ve been busy with Christmas and New Years, but being sick of the cold weather I was looking forward to Spring and made these.

These should work in all versions of Illustrator.

Hope you enjoy them

Rainbow Brushes (3)

If you’re working with vectors, leaving open paths in your work is a big no no (I discovered the hard way). Unfortunately, Illustrator doesn’t come with a built in way of finding and closing open paths, so you’re left to eyeball it which in a complex vector doesn’t always work so well.

For older versions of Illustrator (10/CS/CS2), Rick Johnson has some great plugins including one to automatically close paths. Alas, his plugin doesn’t work in CS4. (more…)

Christmas Vector Banner

I love the holidays :)  The .zip file contains a CS4 .ai file, a legacy .ai file and a .png.

Christmas Banner (8)

Holiday Vector Tree Scene

Christmas Tree Scene (8)

No time to play today!

Pixel in Vector Graphic

I’ve been working a bit with some pictures I had on file, just having fun over the holiday weekend

One issue I have with digital cameras is the automatic focus, it seems that the camera never focuses on what I want it to and I end up with a lovely close up of a weed when what I really wanted were the flowers behind it.  Luckily we can fix some of these problems with software touch-ups.  Here I’ve put the focus on the kitten and put the background where it belongs, in the background.  If I get adventurous I’ll fix that pesky grass in the foreground.

I needed some hair for a render I’m working on and thought someone might appreciate a tutorial on how to make hair with The GIMP.  This will work for any hair you’re trying to make, including textures for Second Life.

You’ll want to fill with which ever base color you want your hair to be, in this I’m using black.  Then you add some lines in a lighter color with a medium brush, and some in a slightly lighter color with a medium small brush:

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I’m always looking for a texture, a bit of this or that to go with something else I’m making, and I’ve spent a lot of time searching the interwebs for them.  Here’s a few sites you might find useful for your texture needs.  As always, please check the usage rules before you use them in a project.

MorgueFile

PixelPoke

The Texture Studio

Noctua Graphics

Image*After

Psionic3D

Filter Forge

Dawid Michalczyk

If you do a lot of graphic arts, or photography, Digimarc offers the only major watermarking system that I’m aware of.  With a subscription you can track your watermarks, and even use Digimarcs backup system which is kind of cool.  As of now, the plugin only supports Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements which seems pretty restrictive to me.

The system works, don’t get me wrong, it does exactly what it’s touted to do, and quickly - but the support for this thing is dismal.  I loaded the Photoshop plugin on my old system and as I recall it was a bit of a bear, I ended up fighting with it for a while to get it installed correctly.  Now that I’m trying to install it on my new system, it’s a no go.  I’m guessing this is a lack of Vista support.

Regardless of whether you can get the downloaded plugin to work, Photoshop CS3 comes with an older one already loaded and you can log your Digimarc ID into it.  It looks like something circa 1990 though, very retro if you know what I mean.

Anyway, it works beautifully, with minimal degredation of your graphic though you’ll have to play with the settings a bit to attain the best match.

UPDATE!:  I found the good drivers for this, if you need them contact me  at bunneh at pixelbunneh dot com or drop a comment here and I’ll send you a download link.  The correct files look much better, more like we’re in the correct century, though it does say it’s from 2005 :/