Friday is a great day for feasting on delicious eye candy. At least, I think so anyway. The work week is done and it’s time to relax a little and take part in some graphic goodness. I have spent hours browsing the portfolios of the Illustration Artists listed below and I am completely in awe of what they do. I decided that they deserve some recognition for all of their hard work and a “Thank You” for bringing such wonderful images to us all. Each picture below is linked to the artist’s main site and I highly suggest you check them out!! Better yet, the next time you are in need of some illustration work – Keep reading →

The countdown has begun! We are just seven weeks away from the Photoshop World conference! I, however, have nine more interviews to go, so I thought I would double some of them up. Today we have not one, but two installments of the NAPP Interview Series. Keep reading →

In the past week, I haven’t been very social. When I went to set up this week’s Re-Tweets of the week, I realized that I didn’t Re-Tweet a single thing over the last seven days, and posted very little in the way of my own Twitter conversation. Instead, I have been doing a lot of thinking, searching, and questioning, inside of my head about my career and where it might be headed. Freelancing and producing this website over the last year has been wonderful and has made me happier in any job that I have ever had. But, frankly, it just isn’t paying the bills the way I would like it to.

It was time I asked myself the ultimate question…

Keep reading →

Every so often it just feels like my head is filled with floating pieces of ideas or notions. Sometimes when this happens, it helps me if I get them out of my head and turn them into something visual – like writing an article. Writing out my thoughts gives gravity to them and if I can give them gravity, then they become more real and more manageable. The simulated realness then also helps me to be realistic. However, right now, no matter how much I write and try to wrangle those floating pieces to get them to form real thoughts – they are escaping me and it’s making me wish I had a net. Keep reading →

I have this weird thing that I do while I’m surfing Twitter. I mark odd Tweets as favorites. Pretty much, anything that strange, quirky or makes me laugh gets a star. When I feel like I am in need of a good giggle, I’ll go back through my Stars.

Today marks the end of a long and stressful week and I feel like giggling. And as today is also “Follow Friday” on Twitter, I thought I would share with you some of my most favorite Stars and tell you to go follow them. Keep reading →

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I love RC! If you ever get the opportunity to see this man teach live, drop everything you are doing and take it! His classes are loaded with unstoppable passion and energy and by the time you walk out, you yourself feel unstoppable. It’s an amazing rush and I speak from experience. It is a great honor to have RC here with us today. And with that, I give you the next installment of the NAPP Interview Series… Keep reading →

Ok, so the title is growing on me.

Here are this week’s:

Top Ten Re-Tweets Of The Week! Keep reading →

My fella and I rented a movie over the weekend called “The Invention of Lying”. In the movie everyone spoke their mind all of the time, and the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ didn’t exist because everything spoken was a fact. The absurdity of this concept left the two of us giggling with amusement. In the movie there was no such thing as “sugar coating” something to spare a person’s feelings and it was just expected that if you were having a thought, you were going to share it with those around you. The simple question “How are you?” would be met with a detailed description of how the character actually was, and this would give all new insight to the inner-workings of that character’s mind. If you were watching a commercial for a product it was simply stated “this is the same thing you’ve been buying for years, we’re just asking you to keep buying it, and buy more of it.” It was a fascinating concept and for me, it was fun to watch.

Today, I started to think about how this “no lying” concept would go over if it was suddenly introduced into the world of Social Media and the Internet. Keep reading →

Hi everyone! Happy Monday to you all. For this week’s new content I have three new Photoshop Layer Style packs for you, each containing five styles. I actually stumbled on to this look on accident when I was attempting to make a rushed coupon for my dad for his birthday. I wanted to treat him to ice cream so I wanted the text on the coupon to have sort of a candy look to it. Well, due to him walking within sight as I was making it, I had to quit before I was finished. When I came back to it, I realized that I had made a pretty cool looking plastic effect. So, after some more tinkering, I made the first two plastic packs in a hard and soft shine. Then, after playing some more, I came across this cool Neon outline effect, that I discovered I could make using the Drop Shadow.

So, click the pic, and download these fun new styles. And once you have these effects open, be sure to check out the settings on each. Although you’ll see that the Stroke was used in each style, it is actually a tricky Drop Shadow that is really doing the outline work.

A debate took place on Twitter and Facebook that was spurred by one of the questions I asked Lesa in her interview yesterday. In the question I referred to Photoshop as a “Boys Club” and used some members of the Kelby Media Group to back up my point. It was then argued that there were plenty of outstanding women in the field of Photoshop and that most, if not – all, of them worked for the Kelby Media company. So just to be clear, I want to talk this out. Keep reading →