This texture is somewhat of a wood styled texture. It didn’t take me long to create it. I am one of those that once I get something in my head I kind of know exactly what I need to do in order to achieve it.
I have been wanting to do this post for quite some time now. I come across so many wonderful sites that offer just amazing free design elements. Everything from free brushes, free textures, free plug ins and filters to tubes for paint shop pro is out there for the taking. Today I want to share with my readers my arsenal of sites that I have found, used and love to check in with every day or every week just to see what is new.
First off is Obsidian Dawn , this is ran by a gal named Stephanie who is mind boggling talented with Photoshop brushes. She offers free brush packs for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, GIMP, and Paint Shop Pro. There is also a Flickr group as well where users of her brush packs can share and show off what they create with her fabulous materials.
Then there is a new forum I joined last month or so called PSP Showdown . It has a small but active community full of wonderfully creative men and women. This forum offers masks challenges, tube challenges, has a safe tubes permission list for the newbie who doesn’t know what artists out there are safe to use and who isn’t. I think this is a must for every forum that is digital design related so there is less of a chance for copyright infringement. For myslelf I had to learn the hard way when I used an image for something and got a nasty email from a forum owner from the former MSN groups. That my friends was a good learning experience. PSP Showdown has already earned kudos in my book for fulfilling a personal request to have a set of masks emailed to me in a .zip folder because they weren’t saving correctly to my mask files in paint shop pro. Vivian emailed them to me post haste and by Monday evening of this week I had them and was off creating.
Torley Textures has a massive free texture pack offering. I was floored in drop jawed amazement when I saw the massive amounts of textures they were just giving away. Needless to say I was in snag mode as I immediately added these all to my texture files as well as my patterns files. They have unique abstract patterns which are vibrant and colorful as well as eye popping.
Lost and Taken has free textures as well. There are often texture packs that offer textures found in nature and the real world. I had to laugh softly when I saw there were even textures from the sides of garbage dumpsters. I like the rust textures the most tho. I think rust and grunge are just awesome. If you have ever looked at my site I mean really paid attention to the details in the sidebars and borders there is subtle hints of kind of a slight grunge effect. That is what attracted the theme that I use now to me.
Corel Paint Shop Pro Users Flickr Group has great discussions with users often contributing information on how to do things that you won’t find in the users manual when you open the box and install the software.
The Plug In Site offers free plug ins and filters. They also offer abstract and mutation packs at a reasonable price as well. I ordered them for less than a $10 bill. There are literally a thousand images with this pack. So yeah I got my money’s worth and then some. I really got these for a steal. Also Harrold Heim who runs the site offers great customer service. I had a question about how to upload this to my paint shop pro program and he was very timely getting back to me personally.
BittBox well for me is for those who are way more talented than I an armchair designer could ever hope to be. I think these folks who participate in the users group on Flickr must have some formal design training that I don’t posses yet.
I hope that you enjoyed this post and I encourage you to check these wonderful resources out. In parting I want to share with you a design I finished this week courtesy the materials I found at The Plug In Site and PSP Showdown.
I am gonna do some mad hatter posting to get what I consider to be my best stuff out to you in time to go out with the old year and bring in the new. These are textures I did this year. The green cross hatch, foil, and fall leaves I did for my guest posting Texture Tuesday With Wildheart over at Scraps of Mind. The plaster looking one is one I created just for the fun of it. I was absolutely pleased with how the plaster look came out. It looks like the trowel just had a hey day with it. The fall leaves were inspired by watching swirling leaves in the parking lot. My attempt at concrete was inspired by looking at the patterns in concrete made when forming it as it dries with a trowel that has more of a serrated edge to it.
This is an old paper texture I learned how to make from yet another nansonsplace.com tutorial. The tutorial works straight across the board for paint shop pro 9 until you hit step 10 of the tutorial. In their tutorial the textured paper already has a blurred look by this point. In version 9 I didn’t get the blurred look until the end when I went in to adjust>soften>soft focus.
In step 12 when you go into adjust the midtone: adjust>brightness and contrast>highlight/midtone/shadow the radio buttons for version 8 read linear adjustment method and dynamic adjustment method where as for version 9 they are called absolute adjustment and relative adjustment. In paint shop pro 9 you want to check relative adjustment. This step is optional as it is just to make the paper effect look a little darker. But I thought it was necessary to point this out if you are using version 9 or higher as their are differences in each version. As I have said before you don’t really notice a major difference in features and interface especially until you jump from version 8 to version 10 though.
<<Final product after making adjustments in version 9
I got paint shop pro 9 my first or second semester of the first year of college and as with all things shortly after I got it Corel came out with version 10 and now they have version 11.
Another successful attempt at a tutorial from nansonsplace.com . I am really pleased with how well this one turned out . This persons tutorials are so easy to follow. There are detailed screen shots of everything. This site gives you very clear and easy to follow steps so that you can recreate the tutorials with ease.
Don’t let the fact that it only supports version 7 and 8 of paint shop pro deter you from trying these tutorials out on version 9,10 and 11. From the way things are set up on version 9 there isn’t much of a difference between version 8 and 9. I would say there is more of a drastic difference between 8 and 10 and even 9 and 10 in the way the interface is set up. Plus in my opinion I have tried version 10 on a trial and to me it feels as if it is geared towards the photo editor type of person. Paint shop pro 7,8 and 9 are more graphic design oriented.
Next installment is another try at a different type of textured paper tutorial.
I learned how to make frames from a great tutorial found on nansonsplace.com. The fact that the process really is such an easy one just amazed me. I could spend hours making frames now that I know how to do them. You can make frames with textures,patterns,solid colors,gradients,tubes and brush art. Some I have made with patterns, some with gradients and some a combination of tubes and gradients or tubes and patterns. After revisiting nansonsplace I also noticed that you can add layers to frames too. I will try this some time and see what kind of results I get. For now please enjoy these frames and I hope you take some, but please make sure I get credit for them. Please credit them Wildheart’s Works wherever you use them.
I will give you the link to nansonsplace since I am not sure if copying and pasting their tutorial would qualify as a “Quick Guide” as per their TOU. To add my frames to your paint shop pro program simply right click on the frame you want, click save as, go to your paint shop pro files, find your frames folder click on it and your done. I know for the seasoned paint shop pro user this is a no brainer but there are those who like myself were paint shop newbies at one time that need step by step how to do things.
I did another experiment on doing a Photoshop tutorial with paint shop pro.
The first 60 x 60 pixel is the one I tried with paint shop that was geared toward Photoshop.
<--other than the color not being the same the effect came out about the same The second one is what I got with doing it the way it was supposed to be done for paint shop pro. <-- I like the end result for this one I am going to resize it and use it for backgrounds
I have the link around here somewhere in my history I had thought I bookmarked it but I couldn’t find it in my bookmarks I came across it while Stumbling yesterday. I was an idiot and didn’t Technorati it or Stumble it either. Yeah go ahead and say it I am such a freakin scatter brain. Well if I can find the link to the site I will for sure do a follow up post for you with the correct information.
A digital design enthusiast whose main love is everything Paint Shop Pro.
I enjoy creating textures, making frames, and discovering new techniques in using my Paint Shop Pro program.
I also like to explore the internet and uncover new how to's to make my time as well as others more productive and enjoyable. I want to help others discover how to make the most out of their internet experience.
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