I have a real treat for you, Rene Blooms of Reneblooms.com has designed a Mother's Day kit of Lilac Papers and Illustrations to help you design you own handmade cards. Rene pronounced "Ree-Nee", not Renee) has been teaching herself graphic design over the past few years. It really is her "calling". She is a fellow designer and sufferer of chronic depression and talks about it on her site freely and how it effects her daily life. As I am also a sufferer I am blessed and excited to have a partner in the artistic walk of life. I am also excited to have her join the team here at Graphic Quest as a Collaborator. This free Lilac Mother's Day paper set Rene Created for you can be used Commercially, Personally or however you want. Click on button below to download. Enjoy! Using the paper design above I created a Free Mother's Day Gift Card & Gift Set that you can have for free on Rene's Website. She will be publishing it soon. Here is what it looks like. How do you get it? Visit Reneblooms.com
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If you love producing artistic design work, DesignCuts gives you the unique chance to own thousands of best-selling resources from some of the top artists in the world, for a staggering 98% off. These resources would take a lifetime to create from scratch. Having them all in your creative arsenal means that you’ll save a ton of time and reduce stress in your creative projects. Prepare to feel inspired! Discover gorgeous illustrations from Lisa Glanz, incredible fonts from Callie Hegstrom and game-changing innovative new brushes from Creators Couture, along with a vast range of quality products from other top designers. I am going to highlight some of the pieces I worked with from an incredible bundle put together by DesignCuts featuring the above artists plus many more. First to give you an idea of what we are working with here is a synopsis of the bundle called “The Extensive Hand-Crafted Design Bundle” It's only available for a limited time; less than 8 days, so grab it now if you want it. They never repeat the same bundle. Plus it features:
The first Kit I worked with from the bundle was the Lisa Glanz “Spring Adventures Designers Kit”. Wow did this save me some time. I was able to start designing one of my Tea Talk™ kits immediately without having to design the papers or illustrations. Instead of taking me eight hours, I was done creating my own kit in two by using the pre-created illustrations and patterns in Lisa's kit. Check this out. Then I worked with the So Nice “Bright Life Watercolor Set” within the bundle. It can be used for various purposes such as logos, wedding invitation, t-shirt, label, badges, greetings, packaging, stationery, posters, websites, digital presentations and more… What I used it for was a Planner set. Again since it included really bright watercolor illustrations I was able to create my sticker sets so much faster. Normally it takes days to create this many water color pieces and several more days to scan them in and clean them up to get them ready to make a digital illustration set. Having them done for me ahead of time takes days of work out of my time so I can just lay them up and create. Here is how the planner set turned out. I have been super lazy by not learning to use my Wacom tablet. So I figured now was the time to figure out how to use it and test out this next package I will be discussing as I know I am missing a lot of opportunities by not using my tablet. For instance I still hand draw my illustrations and I know I can skip a lot of steps by just drawing straight to Adobe Illustrator. So I pulled out my tablet and hooked it up to test out the Creators Couture “Impressionist Masters Color Blends”. This particular collection includes 175 PreFAB colors, carefully sampled and meticulously created from actual paintings by Impressionist Masters! The creator spent weeks researching famous impressionist painters and works. Then, painstakingly created color blends by pulling individual colors from small areas of their famous works to create color blends! You are literally painting with the same colors as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas! My first experiment was doing a couple of poppies. See Below.
Today I launched in the store an adorable Junk Journal that took me several days to create. I used PH Neutral PVA book glue for this project, recycled items from around the house, some of my old vintage papers, plus journal cards from my collection. This ring Journal can be added to and edited however you choose to use it. See the video for more detailed info and a walk through the book. Enjoy! Want to buy it before it's gone? Get it here: Junk Journal Hi friends! Glad you stopped by to check out this edition about choosing backgrounds for your designs. Below is an amazing background and texture package I picked up from DesignCuts for only $29. I am going to use some of it today to show you a few things you can do with it. I had a great time with this awesome bundle. If you find you are interested in it too get over there this second before it times out! It is available for only 8 more days. That's a lot to look at right? Yep and this bundle may help you a lot with answering the next question. So how do you go about choosing or creating a background image for your design, digital game, photographs, scrapbooks, cards, fabric, and pretty much anything else you can think of? Well its all about symmetry and using your gut instinct. It may also help to see what is up and coming and popular depending on the feel you are trying to achieve. For instance the most popular backgrounds right now are geometric, marble, faded or mute color, grunge (been in for a while). But are these right for you? Choosing a right background texture or pattern can totally set or break the mood of what you are trying to convey. So let us for an example say we are developing a website for deodorant. We could go a few ways to set the mood on our main page. We could try a grunge background texture behind our male model using one of the Kim Klassen samples above. What would that convey? Grunge could convey the dirty, stinky, route. By using a grunge texture for layers both over your model figure and behind in the background sets the mood to be used with the slogan; "Are you dirt nasty?" Try BoDOH! See left image below. I used the same day photography images of actor Joe Manganiello (Sorry Joe) to prove that just changing a background can have a huge effect. On the left we were going for the grungy dirty look to "sell deodorant". On the right using a background from Hot Pixels, (Included in the bundle) we convey an entirely different feel. A more clean modern look that you might find on the front of GQ™ or Muscle Magazine™. Just by slightly dimming the actor by 90% on his layer in our Corel Photo Pro, gave us that more modern effect of muted/faded color and image without losing the clean feel. Now which one would you prefer to see on a deodorant website? And why? Again its about instinct and using your gut. What feeling are you trying to convey? What is YOUR message. Which one is going to sell your message? Here is another sample. Staff artist Angel Koch took images from the texture bundle to create a 9 page Planner sticker bundle. She was trying to convey a soft harmonious feel to this bundle. Did she succeed? You can get this bundle at a discount here: PASSIONATE 9 Angel used the textures from the Bloom files included in the Texture Bundle. There are over a thousand images included in this texture bundle and she was able to create this set just using one small file of images. I personally love them. Here is what Angel had to say about it. Hi again GrafXQuest guests, it's Angel Koch again; President, Co Owner and designer of Flamango Door the Planner store here on GrafXQuest. I am back this week to play around with some graphics from DesignCuts. Once again there were really so many to choose from in the texture bundle that I had a hard time choosing what to start with! I decided to go with Bloom and I had plenty to work with! I created 9 planner sticker sets this time that I am very crazy about! I cannot choose a favorite. The patterns were super cohesive and I used matching solid colors for full boxes, half boxes, ombre boxes, headers, checklists, and movie marquees. I then printed them all out onto full sheet label stickers using my color inkjet printer at home, and kiss-cut them using an Xacto blade and a bit of patience. I put them in my own bullet journal using my go-to vertical layout reminiscent of Eric Condren and Happy Planner style. Here is my personal review of the graphics product above from DesignCuts: You get over a thousand of textures to play with for a tremendously good price! I was able to use the images without trouble, they easily fit into my Silhouette Studio program, no resizing or touching up at all, no converting to other file types, either. Working with them was a dream, and my planner stickers are beautiful! I would definitely recommend this bundle as I have enough to play with for months. The sale won't last long, though, so you'd better hurry! Thanks for your time -Angel Thanks so much Angel for playing with the bundle and giving us your valuable opinion. I also just created a freebie for our Newsletter followers, (below). Using the metallic rose gold patterns included in the package by Zepplin, I created a cute little stationary set. Unfortunately unless you are already signed up for our Newsletter you wont get this one as it has already launched; the one below is not full sized. But sign up for our Newsletter to get fun free printables like this one in the future. Now I am off to go use this texture pack to make some Paper, Spring Cards, and Mother's Day cards! See you on the flip side and thanks for joining us! `Lady T
Hi all its' Lady T and let me tell you as a designer I am constantly on the hunt for visual digital content that is new, fresh, and will awe my guest, (customer) . I look for something that not only grabs the eye but takes your breath away. Something that makes you say 'I wish I had thought of that or I can't live without that'. If I haven't accomplished that then I haven't done my job very well as a designer. And that would be “AWE”ful. I create a lot of my content but not all of it. It takes a lot of time to be your own art director, artist, marketing department, and publicist. So how does one go about finding good content that not only inspires, but also fits within your budget and lets you wear the hat of many roles? Buying art from other people to use in your own products can be very expensive can't it? And what about creative licenses, that can be sticky too. The answer is to do a lot of research on the internet and occasionally you get extremely lucky and trip over a phenomenal find like DesignCuts. What is extraordinary about this company in particular is they bundle design packages by top Artists in the country that can be used together or separately. They offer an amazing amount of content in the bundle and the bundles usually are only $29 USD. The best thing of all is that they offer an extended license on their bundles which means I can use their content from these bundles over and again commercially. That makes it extremely valuable to me because this content can be used in so many ways from creating backgrounds to foregrounds to digital papers, letters and more you name it AND I can sell what I make with it, not just for personal use. Because we use a lot of content from DesignCuts they have asked us to try out and do an honest review of their most current bundle “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”. Are you kidding?! Bring it on! First lets start with what came in the collection and then I will show you some samples of what I did. I will then also share our guest artist; Angel's personal opinion as she worked with one portion of the bundle in particular and rocked it out. This creative collection knocked my panties off featuring thousands of assets built to save serious time in my creative work. Professional logos with a super epic Feminine Logo Creator, realistic brush details with GrutBrushes and Retro Supply Co, and gorgeous watercolor touches and kits. There is a Woody texture design kit to change your text to wood and Cloud effect brushes unlike any I have ever seen. Vintage constellation and Medical kits, and and...ok I am loosing my breath because I got so excited! But there is a lot of stuff. So lets look at some of the things we played with! First I created an exclusive freebie for my newsletter followers called Yesteryear, (shown here) which features several elements I pulled from the “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”. I used the included Pattern Pop collection for the washi samples which were in PNG formats with clear backgrounds. I was able to pull those in and size them down to half inch strips. Even though the Pattern Pop washi comes with gold, silver and rose gold pieces, they were very easy to re-colorize in Corel/Phototshop to match the freebie color tones so that is what I did. I then used the Eclectic Anthology kit for creating the actual post cards with ripped edges, corners, the vintage paper creator, and the huge collection of antique stamps and cancellation stamps. It was a dream to use and very easy to put the images together to make these vintage looking pieces using layers. I also re-colorized some of these pieces as well which was super easy to do as the PNG's are super clean images and a dream to work with. The hard part was choosing which stamp. There were well over 60 beautiful ones to choose from. The third kit I used from this bundle for the note cards was from Vector Hut, whose focus is to collect, restore and re-purpose old and forgotten artwork that they find within pre-1900s books and ephemera. I chose a Marigold but decided to go with the scientific name when creating the card because that would have been more typical to the era found in printed items. Well I am going to run off to play with some more stuff, I am going to create some 12X12 300 DPI digital papers now with the Sky Box Creative set. Want to see two so far? Stay tuned and see Below! Go check out the bundle...and see you around the intergalactic water-cooler ;) I will let Angel take it from here, well...ok actually in two more paragraphs I will! Angel has been working on an extensive 5 page planner sticker set with well over 400 stickers for planners, journals and bullet planners. This set is absolutely heart stopping, brain altering, breath capturing goodness and she did it by choosing the Mix Pix Box's collection of Lights & Stars from “The Inspiring Artistic Design Collection”. So what does Angel say? Ok Angel NOW its' your turn. Hi GrafXQuest guests, I am Angel Koch; President, Co Owner and designer of Flamango Door the Planner store here on GrafXQuest. I had the opportunity this week to play around with some graphics from DesignCuts. There were really so many to choose from in the bundle that is on sale right now, I had a hard time choosing what to start with! I decided to go with the Lights and Stars pack, focusing on the 22 backgrounds and leaving the layering pngs for another time. I had plenty to work with! I created 5 planner sticker sets that I totally love! I cannot choose a favorite. I wanted to highlight the patterns as much as possible, so I didn't use any solid colors for full boxes, half boxes, ombre boxes, headers, checklists, or movie marquees. I printed them all out onto full sheet label stickers using my color inkjet printer at home, and kiss-cut them using an Xacto blade and a bit of patience. I put them to use in my bullet journal using my go-to vertical layout reminiscent of Eric Condren and Happy Planner style. Here is my personal review of the graphics product from DesignCuts: You get so much to play with for a tremendously good price! I was able to use the images without trouble, they easily fit into my Silhouette Studio program, no resizing or touching up at all, no converting to other file types, either. Working with them was a dream, and my planner stickers are beautiful! I would definitely recommend this bundle. The sale won't last long, though, so you'd better hurry! Angel is right there is an end date on this super cool bundle and it ends in a couple of days. Just think of all the things you can do with it, cards, stationary, gift wrap, zazzle material, T-shirts and it just doesn't end there. Why am I telling you this? Because I use their product all the time and I wouldn't tell you about someone unless I used them first and approved. It is high quality and the waiting list for high end artists to submit material to DesignCuts is long. Even I have tried to get on it and have been turned down for now. The list has some heavy hitters on it. But that is puuurrrfectly fine with me I will just continue to lick up the cream. ;) If you create something with this bundle by the way I want to see it. Submit it to us through our contact form to share with others, we want to show your talent. God Bless! PS I almost forgot! I wanted to show you how versatile these bundles are and why I am a raving fan. Way above earlier Angel used the Mix Pix Box Light & Stars to create her 5 page sticker package. To give you an idea of how versatile these design collections are for using with your own products I used that same package but on this photo on the right. See how I was able to add a more magical and whimsical touch to the image on the right just by overlaying some of the PNG's from the Mix Pix Box set and then going back over the model and the Hawk with an eraser. This gave them a more glorious and shining appeal don't you think? Fun stuff!
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