Design News

Illustrator CS5 includes some great new drawing tools, including a set of perspective guides and natural media effects. Here we take you through how to use them.

Self taught illustrator Marleen Weijman conjures up her striking vexel artworks working primarily with Photoshop. Working under the artist name Womanwithagun, her depictions of the contemporary music and fashion scene are using a poppy style of representation. Her pet project is the series of eye-catching portraits Marleen created of pop diva Lady Gaga. The illustrations combine a striking elegance with a dramatic visual impact, and play upon the viewer as skillfully as the real Lady Gaga. Smashing!

It's been 20 years since Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released, and today more and more illustrators and graphic art professionals all over the world are using Adobe's products to produce digital art, illustrations, photo retouches, videos, web sites and other creative material. Let’s have a look at the history of Adobe’s creative software.

Sicksystems was established in 2003 in Moscow, Russia by three graffiti artists; Aske, Kola and Kio. It hasn’t taken long for Sicksystems to extend their creative arms to graphic design, vector art, illustration, identity, typography and calligraphy. In 2009, Sicksystems became the personal project of its most active member, Aske. The Sicksystems style is an inspiring blend of contemporary cubism, geometric shapes and modern typography infused with wildstyle graffiti lettering.

Cristiano Siqueira, popularly known as Crisvector, is a digital illustrator from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Siqueira blends vector art, 3D design and Photoshop together to create his distinct digital art. Deriving his inspiration from web 2.0 and the worlds of music, movies, gaming and art, Cristiano pushes the boundaries of his visual planet on a daily basis.

Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator share many of the creative capabilities of the other. Photoshop is a bitmap image manipulation and processing program that is perfect for creating, outputting or modifying digital images of a photographic nature. Illustrator is a vector based drawing program that generates individual vector objects (Bezier curves) that retain their characteristics and are not part of a bitmap. Although the creative programs Photoshop and Illustrator are manufactured by Adobe, there are quite some differences.

Vector Magic is an online script developed by the University of Stanford, which is capable of converting raster images to vector images. Illustrators and graphic designers are guided thoroughly through the procedure with explanations, which help them understand each step in the vectorization process.