Photoshopblog.net

The search for free, good quality texture resources has become an almost hopeless work. The moment when you’ve found a new source you’re happy, quality looks good and suddenly you see they want you to pay for them. Because there are so few for free it makes it even more hard to find the best. But here we are.

TextureKing

High quality textures, free for all use! Be aware that all the textures are zipped, so it does take you quite a time. But it’s worth it.

Grunge Textures

A very big and still growing collection of free and high quality images.

Textures on deviantART

Free textures in high resolution and good quality, you’ll be amazed. Be sure to search on ‘Popular’.

Luckily there are resources like patterns.
Resources a designer will hopefully never have to pay for. Good patterns are always fun to see in a design. And here we are again with the best, and only the best. Be sure to check out the pixel pattern tutorial. Have fun with them!

The Inspirational Gallery

A gallery full of unique and original borders, backgrounds, wallpaper patterns, etc.
The wallpaper-section is filled with tons of flower patterns, which is fun to use in your designs.
Yes, the site is pretty old and not updated in quite a while but the stuff is still good for use. And the best of it all, it’s free!

Kaliber10k

As they say for themselves ‘deliciously pixellated patterns’, what they really are. Around 950 patterns, again free for use!

10 Grungy Patterns

This is a collection of ten 1000×1000 pixels seamless textures. And they are free.

Pixel Pattern Tutorial

Brushes have become an almost-daily use for any designer.
Finding brushes might not be a problem, but finding decent ones is actually a true challenge.

Often you’ll be stumbling upon useless and overrated stocks. That’s why we collected the best resource-websites with photoshop-brushes to be found on the net. You’ll be amazed by the great amount of quality-brushes…

100 High Resolution Brushes - Size does matter in Photoshop, that’s why these PS’ers collected the highest resolution brushes.

Photoshop Brushes on deviantART - Probably the biggest source of brushes to be found on the internet. It’s best to search on popular.

Brusheezy - Not only a place to download brushes, but you can also vote for the best brushes.

500ml Brushes - Lots of image packs of several brush sets are available here.

Since quite a long time, I’m active on two different digital art communities, Deviantart and SXC. The first is more about creation, the second about the sharing of pictures (comes often to use when I need to spice up a webdesign with some goodlooking pictures). All of my pictures on SXC are released under a CC (Creative Commons) license, so others are free to use them in commercial or non-commercial projects. Of course I’m always interested to see what people do with these pictures. Especially my Tokyo and Hongkong pictures are clearly used a lot in some real-estate and entertainment magazines. But today I was amazed to see what a Deviantart member, FrozenStaRo, has done with this picture of the -breathtaking- Hong Kong skyline (be sure to check out the full view):

Awesome job! Would love to have a print of this piece on my wall ..

CNet’s News.com reports that Adobe Systems has plans to introduce a hosted version of Photoshop in the next six months. Previously, they launched Adobe Remix, an online video editing tool available to the users of Photobucket (owned by Adobe). With this online version of Photoshop, they continue to offer free, entry-level versions of their more sophisticated image- and video-editing tools, including Photoshop. And at the same time, they secure their market position in this field, before concurrents like Google do it. Looks like an interesting trend!

Wow, this is one of the most usefull articles I recently came across: Tutorialblog compiles a list of excellent free Photoshop-brushes for all needs. My personal favorite: the Foliage set. Go get these goodies!

If you haven’t already downloaded the official beta of Photoshop CS3, you’ll be convinced after watching this video walktrough by world-famous Deke McClelland.

After the overwhelming succes of the Dove commercial (wich shows how a professional retoucher creates a perfect billboard picture from a “normal” photo with only Photosho), Rodrigo Bressane saw his chance and he made a retouching movie too. He shows his the before-and-after pictures and a lot of stages in between - too bad you can’t see the Photoshop tools he’s using.

Nice piece of viral marketing, so check his website Bressane.com too!

BrainFuel has an interesting compilation of 10 of their favourite shortcuts and tricks.
There could be something new for you, beginner or advanced!

Is it a photo?
Is it a 3D-render?
No! This is a digital painting by Bert Monroy, completely done in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

He took his time for this masterpiece, take a look at the stats:

• The image size is 40 inches by 120 inches.
• The flattened file weighs in at 1.7 Gigabytes.
• It took eleven months (close to 2,000 hours) to create.
• The painting is comprised of close to fifty individual Photoshop files.
• Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 15,000 layers.
• Over 500 alpha channels were used for various effects.
• Over 250,000 paths make up the multitude of shapes throughout the scene. 

Amazing work!

Today I found this website MangaRevolution, wich has an impressive gallery of tutorials teaching to draw Manga figures. From drawing hands and eyes to topics like coloring in Photoshop. Interesting stuff!