iPhone wallpaper with icon shelves

I found some nice wallpapers for my iPhone which have little shelves for the home screen icons. If you have a shelf template you can throw it on top of any wallpaper you design and it’s a neat addition.

I got a screenshot from the phone and used guides to mark the positions of the icons. I added squares in those positions and rounded the corners. I drew my shelves and that was it. I saved the shelves as a template and worked on my first shelf life wallpaper.

The icy effect is one of Inkscape’s filters.

Paper Textures in GIMP for User interface Design

If you’ve downloaded any apps for your phone recently I bet some of them use a paper texture for the user interface. The Twitter app and website spring to mind. It’s used to add a subtle richness without losing simplicity.

A quick search will give you this tutorial by an interface designer on how to achieve this effect in GIMP. It’s pretty simple but you’ll need to play around with the values to get the exact effect you want.

My iPhone-sized interface design is absurdly simple. There is only one place to click! It should be enough to demonstrate the paper texture though

The font is Rockwell and the pin-up girl is a brush set from here.

iPhone 4 Wallpaper

Working in GIMP I made the background in the same way as this post but changing the starting colour from black to a rusty red. Check out the Path website to see why. For convenience I created a new document template using the iPhone 4 screen resolution and PPI (960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi) Just create your document then (File > Save As Template).

I did the kitty illustration in Inkscape and exported the bitmap. I dragged it into GIMP and gave it a drop shadow (Filters > Light and Shadow > Drop Shadow). Done!

Love Coupons

Just after midnight, officially Valentine’s Day and I’m up making my kawaii LOVE COUPONS! I must go to bed. I had loads more ideas but they will have to wait. Just glad I got some made in time! Feel free to download and give to your valentine.

EDIT: The font is Poor Richard and the hearts were placed on an invisible (white on white) path using the Scatter Extension which doesn’t deform them like Pattern Along Path.

Employ Courage

Alain de Botton, one of my favourite authors has a new book out, “Religion for Atheists.” You can check out his sermon on the topic at the School of Life below. I liked his sermon and the part (around the 25 minute mark) where says that secular artists, as opposed to religious ones, don’t like to be didactic and yet our culture is pervaded with messages (predominantly commercial) and jokes, “Coca Cola has the run of our inner lives.”

It reminded me of an art project I once did (but didn’t show anyone) where I took advertising and changed the text so that they were hijacked to perform as cheerleaders and moral support for me. With the same concept in mind I decided to fire up Inkscape and produce this pastiche logo which I hope inspires you to employ courage…… at some point in the future ….. or at least think about it. This one’s for you, Alain.

p.s. the font is Loki Cola, free at dafont.com

Alain de Botton On Religion for Atheists from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Chinese style dragon

Here in Japan the 12-year Chinese horoscope assigns an animal to each year in the cycle. Last year was the year of the rabbit and this year it’s the dragon. There are a lot of New Year cards with cute dragons on them and traditional Chinese style dragons. I’ve gone about half way between the two with my illustration. Happy New Year!

Bottle cap

For this post I went back to my roots, watching an old screencast by HEATHENX. For some reason, I’m into star stickers and bottle caps at the moment and I remembered this tutorial. First time round I was still not used to Inkscape and found it too hard. But it just shows if you stick with it for a while you’re bound to improve.

I took the Inkscape vector (top) and opened it in GIMP. I dragged in a grungemap and masked the label part on the grungemap layer. Then I changed the layer mode to overlay. That’s all.

Imitation paper art

After cutting real paper to make paper art Christmas cards for the kids at my school I got a taste for it and started searching the net for examples.

One of these images is paper art by a design company called Bomboland. I liked this image a lot and thought it could also be done as a vector, for good or for bad.

Each shape has a subtle gradient and most of the shadows were done with the fantastic drop shadow filter (FILTER> SHADOWS AND GLOWS> DROP SHADOW) which means that your shadow will follow its object around just like yours. Of course the 3D distortion of shadows (e.g. on the clouds by the funnel) were done by hand with node sculpting.

The are many natural layers of paper in the original image and it requires lots of Inkscape layers to organise this image.

I think I did a pretty good job of showing it can be done in Inkscape. I think I’ll return to this one and add some paper texture and lighting effects in GIMP.

Let it snow

I need to find out how to make realistic looking snow for all my seasonal production. I found this twin set of video tutorials that show you how to make falling snow, snow drifts and snow-laden text.

I added a tree from a set of tree brushes, some lighting and a lens flare. I also used a motion blur on the falling snow.

Retro poster

I’ve been wanting to try out this tutorial for ages but couldn’t seem to get around to it. It’s PA BLOG’s Cool Typography Design Poster in Gimp tutorial. Go check it out and try it yourself.

You can learn a lot about layers and blend modes, gradient fill, speeding up your work and adding photographic details with brushes and design principles.