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

The first is this highly detailed hot rod vector artwork image….

you can download from Freestockvectors.com HERE

Secondly, some tandem paragliders in flight

which can also be downloaded from Freevectorstock.com HERE

Enjoy these free vector artwork files and don’t forget, if you make money out of them, donate a dollar!

Uploading your work to the free vector galleries mentioned in this article is a great way to showcase your work, monitor it’s popularity and make people aware of your artwork and website.

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….

I put aside 3 hours to try and improve on things. I had the photographs above and what I could download from his website (www.keswickoutdoors.com). I picked a particular photo to start off…

This, I decided to use as the central picture, not sure why, but you have to start somewhere! Looking through the activities that the kids were involved in, I had a rough concept of sky (paragliding) top, ground (rock climbing) middle and water (canoeing, swimming etc.) bottom. First task then, add some sky….

With a 3 hour window, I wanted to keep complex cut-outs to a minimum, so, using the eraser set to airbrush I roughly blended the top of the original photo into the sky. I had already picked a paragliding picture to go in, so the main group shot was moved to the right.

Next, add more people……

Again, I roughly hacked out the parts I didn’t want. Keeping in the mid section, I added the column of walkers in the fern…

Ok, I was happy so far. Next step was to add the paragliding shot. It’s always a good idea in photo montaging, if you have similar landscapes or horizontal lines in two shots, to line them up. It makes the transition look a lot more natural….

The composition, so far, was lacking people actually enjoying themselves. Time for some smiling faces!

Now I found myself with a horizontal line across the bottom half, not good, try to avoid the shots in you montage merging at the same point, it generates an obvious line to the observer. I revisited the walkers shot and ‘pinched’ a bit more fern.

Still needed more happy faces, time to do a couple of cut-outs….

Looking ok, now I was running out of space for the water activities. I had only a few pictures here, if in doubt just throw one in….

As you can see, I had to extend the water by flipping the shot on the left and stretching it horizontally, It would do for now. I had now reached the file size I wanted to work to (A2). What to do about the obvious join?? I still had ample of pictures to use… What about if I try something like this…

Yes! that works… Now I started to add the text, starting with the heading…

I added a dark blue glow on the heading to make it stand out from the sky, happy so far, so time for the details…

I tried to hide the bag in the middle of the poster with the Camp dates box, I didn’t work so they ended up here. Final text to add was the contact details and accreditation…

Nearly there…. It’s always a good idea, when you are nearing the end of a project, to stop and stand back for a minute and take in the big picture. For me there were a few dead areas in the poster, the bottom right, the grass lower centre, the bag and left by the paraglider. I wanted the finished poster to look appealing to kids and parents alike and decided to go a little over the top and show more activites and group shots…

Finally, I added a border just to give the poster some breathing space…..

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, photo montages can often produce stunning results in a surprisingly short period of time.

Burrowdale summer camp is a fantastic experience for your children (plus you get a week off too!), run by professional staff with years of outdoor experience. Burrowdale owner, Jocky Sanderson, as well as being an outdoor pursuits expert is one of the UK’s top paragliding instructors running flying courses worldwide (www.escapexc.com), he was also featured on BBCs ‘Britain from above‘ TV series with Andrew Marr (Check out the behind-the-scenes clip HERE).