It’s Songkran in Thailand (Thai New Year) which normally involves people partying on the streets with water flying everywhere.

Everyone loves a Spitfire, right? well certainly if you are British you will appreciate the history and beauty of this WWII fighter. The team at apaganza are currently working on new Vector CoolKits featuring many aircraft from World War II. The first to be available will be WWII Warbirds – Battle of Britain featuring a wide range from the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane.

These Vector CoolKits will feature highly accurate artwork of these memorable aircraft drawn from the side, top and front with a colour example of each plane.

If you are interested in a free example of the Spitfire above you can visit our area at Vecteezy.com and download it for FREE – HERE

Other Warbirds CoolKits to be released will be German Fighters, RAF Fighters, USAF Fighters and German Bombers. If you are designing airshow posters, book graphics for this era or just would like to have these great vectors for your own personal use watch this space!

It’s Songkran in Thailand (Thai New Year) which involves people partying in the street and throwing copious amounts of water at each other….

In celebration of this annual mayhem, Apaganza will be releasing three new vector packs (totally unrelated to Songkran and water!)

Hogs and Choppers
Harley Davidsons (Hogs), Choppers, Big Bikes and some Biker related graphics make up the superb Vector Coolkit, if you are looking for vector clip art or images for a local bike show or just want some mean looking graphics for a T-shirt design, this is the Coolkit for you!

Scribbly Doodles
A very useful collection of hand drawn scribbles, doodles and scrawls. This is an ideal vector CoolKit for adding a hand drawn look to your illustrations or graphics. This CoolKit comes with many different pen thicknesses and textures…. Happy scribbling!

Oriental Heads and Busts
Due to the popularity of our Oriental statues CoolKit we have released this gem. Oriental Heads and Busts delivers exactly what it says on the box! A collection of peculiar heads and faces taken from a unique set of oriental statues….

All these plus a surprise pack will be released during April 2010, check back here soon and be one of the first to secure these creative Apaganza vector Coolkits…..

The designers at pentagram have come up with an interactive analyst who will assertain your type….

Lay on the couch, answer the questions, and find out, from the font of knowledge, what type you are…. HERE

There are some basic guidelines to follow…

Once finished just scan and upload and a few minutes later you can preview you own font. You can submit as many times as you want….

Here are a few examples of other peoples efforts…

You can download FREE my handwriting at the bottom of this page (You will have to go through the checkout but it’s $0.00)

If you are interested in making your own font, you could do a lot worse than visit this site…

Starting off with another of Noud van Miltenburg’s great illustrations…

My first decision was to bring in the black line illustration and the colour on separate layers, the original colouring wasn’t the correct hue for this shirt and the flames were too literal, so I kept the highlights and shadows and gave it al a blue/grey hue….

The next decision was the background, my concept was to have the statue of liberty climbing out of a distressed chaotic background, this for me was a poiniant image and also had some conatations towards New Yorks recent history. So I wanted to start at the material of the shirt and give that a faded look…

Nouds illustration now needed some loosening up, so using some vectors from our Scribbly Doodles Vector CoolKit
I set about adding a graffitti scribbles…

Not quite enough, a few more needed…

It was beginning to come together now, just a few more to darken the bottom…

The design was taking on a ‘Banksie’ look now, so I decided to add some spray can drips to fortify the graffitti look…

Finally I added the FIGHT GAME branding with some more spray drips…

The finished image was then added to the rest of the range. These Tshirts and hoodies will be available for purchase online very soon, check back to this article soon for more details.

It’s been a long time since I have been reminded of those images, until I stumbled over a website that offers a free service converting any photo on the web to ASCII art. And it does a great job…

The input is easy…

Here are some examples I played around with…

Personally, I think that this technique is due for a revival, I will certainly consider using it in my next design job…. why not?

Visit the website yourself HERE and have some fun……

I often use the layer effects options in Photoshop, they are a great time-saving tool. One of the small details that I find perticularly annoying is they default setting on the outer glow.

As you can see it is set to a sickly yellow at 75% opacity on the ‘screen’ setting. It’s a setting I, personally, never use… so here is the question…

How do you change the default settings for layer effects in Photoshop CS4?

First correct answer posted below wins, good luck….

The Solution

Firstly we contacted our old friend Dong at his Tattoo studio, Dong is a big Thai boxing fan and specialises in Thai dragon and demon (yaak) images.

We selected 5 of Dongs sketches, made a deal and set about designing the shirts. using a mixture of tattoo images, elements from our own Vector CoolKits and some purchased graphics, we set to work. After creating a zillion layers in Photoshop, these are the results.

To make their product unique in the stores and gyms, we designed labels and tags to be added to the shirts….

The Windy dealer was pleased and we were happy to have worked on a unique project such as this. Consequently we have followed the ideas through to MMA shorts and hoodies. The instore graphics and web banners, as you can see, work well with the thai tattoo theme…

So, Windy are back, with a stunning new range of fashion/fight wear, check out their website here…

Nice! The first task was to try and work out some shadow areas, I ran the photo through the posterize filter in Photoshop to see what it would come up with in the way of shadows….

Not brilliant, but it gave my an idea of some areas to work on, so out came the tracing paper and a pencil (for the younger generation, this is a long wooden stick with black stuff in the middle, used for writing and drawing in the old days before mobile phones). Allowing for hair loss, the pencil lines were then fortified with black felt tip

The next step was to scan the shadow trace.

The scan was then placed into illustrator, locked then traced using the pen tool.

I tend to trace in Illustrator using a magenta stroke and no fill, It really helps to see where you are going. Take your time on this part and try to enjoy the process, once you are engrossed you will be surprised how quickly you can do it.

All the shadow shapes finished were then converted to black fills, then printed out on tracing paper and overlaid onto the original picture to sketch in some mid-tone shapes.

There is a certain amount of trial and error here, I find it helps to blur your eyes a bit to help make decisions where the mid-tone line is. But keep going and any parts that don’t ‘look right’ when you trace can be adjusted in Illustrator after.

Again, scan the mid-tone trace and place in Illustrator to trace.

The mid-tones were then carefully traced (on a new layer), coloured and I then went to work on the eyes….

I decided at this point to add Uncle Vince’s trademark of designer glasses, he often wears them and he seemed more recognisable with them on. Back to the eyes…. The eyes were created using the sphere tool and gradients to match eye colour. A few highlights and they began to look good. The eyes, for me, are a main point of focus on the face (unless someone has an ugly wart or huge nose) so spend some time getting them right.

By this point you should end up with something looking like this (previewed in outline mode).

Next I added some highlight details using illustrators blend tool between 2 shapes. The bigger shape being the same as the base flesh colour and the smaller a lighter shade.

Then a few finishing touches, a floral pattern for the shirt, ear rings with highlights and some light shading on his glasses and Bob’s your uncle! (well, vince then), all done!

With a broad keyline added and a snazzy background the result works quite well large and small. This is a good technique for creating portraits for stickers or screen printing where colours are limited. Uncle Vince is happy with it and most of the family seem to recognise who it is and that’s good enough for me….

(actually, now I look at it again and if it were a commercial job I would tidy up the chin shadow a bit… )