Wow, it's been quite a while since I've posted! Place looks a bit dusty and could use some cleaning up. Out with the old and in with some new and all of that.

I am currently cleaning up my tutorial indexes a little bit, for a couple of reasons. Several people over at liveinternet.ru have copied and pasted all of my code in my tutorial indexes and thus are hotlinking all the tutorial images from ME. I've said it several times; hotlinking from me is a huge no-no unless you consent to pay the bandwidth bills for the site that hosts my images.  Not to mention, I think it's just completely rude and lazy to copy and paste entire posts from MY journal into your own. I don't care if your tutorial list has all of the same tutorials as mine, but for God's sake, make your own bloody page and host the images yourself. [/ranty mcrantypants]

Another reason I'm cleaning up the tutorials is that some of the tutorials have been moved, privacy locked, or deleted, or the images in the tutorials no longer exist. I'm purging my lists of these unavailable and broken tutorials. I don't think there's any sense in linking to something that won't be of any help, and I don't feel like joining 52 million communities just to see a tutorial when, if I do enough digging, I can find the same tutorial elsewhere and won't need to join. Sorry if that's too bitchy, but I just don't have time for all of this "I'm a speshul snowflake and so are my tutorials, I have to protect them!" business. 

So, if the tutorial index pages look a mess, it's because they're in repair. I may even set them to private until the work on them is done, I don't know yet, depends on how bad they get.

I DO have a new resource that I'd like to get uploaded here soon, they are very large photos that will make neat light textures. I'm debating on whether to crop them down, recolor them, or just post them large and let y'all recolor/crop them down as you see fit.

Anyway, so that's what's going on around here, just thought I'd drop in and let you know! :)

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I've had an update. Life never slows down, it just gets busier.

I've obtained a copy of Photoshop CS3 and have been spending a little time dabbling with it here and there. I've been looking for tutorials and resources outside of LJ and thought I'd share what I've found. A few of these links are okayfor PSP users, or users of other programs, too.

Pioneer Woman Photography: Actions, tutorials, tricks, and more.
Free Texture Sets on Flickr: BeaPierce, Ground*Floor Volume 1, Ground*Floor Volume 2
Action Central - Free Photoshop Actions 
Layers Magazine - Tutorials 
Michelle Black - Free Actions, Textures, etc. Read through the discussion threads for Freebies, get the free tryout actions on the flickr group's front page. 
Pixelmana - Tutorials for how to make a few special effects & textures.
Martin's Blog - Tutorial: Cross processing effect with photoshop 
Luciferous-glow at DA - Transparent watermarks tutorial, Astral Flora Brushes
Flasheezy - Free flash files and tutorials.
Vecteezy - Free vectors.
Brusheezy - Free photoshop brushes and patterns.

Where did you learn your favorite tips for photoshop, and what are they? Share in the comments!

I have 20 wallpaper sized light textures for you today, divided up into two zip files of 10 light textures each for easier downloading. These light textures were made from my own photography, so credit/comments for these sets would be really nice. I will make icon-sized light textures out of these soon, so do not redistribute these textures yourself. Thanks. 

The previews do not show the textures at full size, obviously. The actual size of each texture is 1024x768 pixels. They have been cropped and resized much smaller than they actually are for the preview. I do still have the original photos, so if you need larger size textures, let me know.

Click the image previews to begin the downloads. 

Okay, I've made some updates. I had a bunch of stuff that I had saved in my faves that I had to do some stuff with, so here's what I've done:

1 - Updated my Resources/Credits page.
2 - Updated the Great Big List of Tutorial Indexes. (The list at resourcelove is the same as the one at icon_tutorial, by the way.)
3 - Updated my own Tutorial Indexes: added a couple of tuts to the Icon Tut Index and cleaned up my index of larger graphics etc, which means I deleted a few dead tut links, added some new tuts, posted thumbnails of the larger images and created new thumbnails for some of the very small images, and separated the wallpaper tuts from the banners and headers. Personally I don't think the last one is that big of a deal, because you can use banner tutorials for wallpapers and vice versa, and you can also use icon tuts for larger images as well, but, you know, OCD and all that. That page still isn't quite as nice as I'd like, but I think I'm done playing with it for now.

Now that all of that's done, I'd like to make a creative update of some sort, some wallpapers or brushes or something, I just haven't figured out what to make yet. But now that things are a little bit cleaned up and caught up, maybe it will be easier for me to relax a little.

She's grown up so pretty, I just had to make some icons. Some of the icons in this batch have a kind of dreamy quality that I love.

NO HOTLINKING. If you don't know what that means, ask me and I'll explain it to you. If you hotlink from me I WILL know and I'll substitute a really nasty image instead, so don't say you weren't warned.

Preview:
  

( Who are you and what have you done with Hermione Granger? )

Comments are love, credit is nice but not required. 
NO SPOILERS.
Enjoy!

So Harry Potter 5 was AWESOME, right? Right. I loved it. I've seen it twice already.

Recent journal updates: I've added a LOT of tutorials to my tutorial lists, mostly icon tuts, but a few header/wallpaper tuts as well. I've also been updating the Great Big List of Tutorial Indexes, as well. If you're looking for new ideas or inspiration, check them out.

I've also been working on some wallpapers of the tv show "The 4400," and I've saved them but don't think they're all that great, so I don't know whether I'll be uploading them or not. I have other ideas for a different style from what I've already done, we'll see if that turns out any better.

Maybe I'll just do some brush sets next, those are pretty hard to mess up.

Anyway, I've seen a warning that there are some serious HP Book 7 spoilers hitting LJ, some of them seem to be popping up in journals that I visit, so I think I might stay away from LJ until after I've read the book. It's only a week away now, yay! :D

that if I don't get back to comments or anything right away, it's because I'm very afraid of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoilers. I see news articles, I see blog posts, all trying to give out Book 7 Information and I DON'T WANT TO KNOW. I would rather read the book and find out for myself.

So I just wanted you to know that if I don't get back to your comment right away, it's probably because I'm hiding from Potential Potter Plot Bunnies. I am not ignoring you, I have not forgotten you, I WILL get back to you at some point, I promise. :)

Two updates in two days? What is wrong with me? Oh, well, more goodies for you, right? :) Comments/credit nice but not needed. NO HOTLINKING, thanks.

One icon texture pack today - 118 fractal textures saved as .png files. Click the image preview to download.

Up next: More brushes, I think, or maybe some graphics for The 4400.

Enjoy! :)

What happens when I don't feel well? Sometimes, I can sleep it off in my bed. Other times, I stay up all night FINALLY making textures from all the stock images just sitting and taking up space on my hard drive. Guess which one happened last night? As I said, these are all made from stock photos. No credit to me is needed, all I did was crop and resize. Comments are awesome, though, so I know what's useful. All of the textures have been saved as .png files except for one wallpaper sized texture in one of the glitter packs - that one is a .jpg. Click the image preview to download the zip files.

More textures and brushes coming. Enjoy! :)

This brush set, like my others, is made from a font. There are 44 brushes in the set and they are large - 500px, but I think most programs allow you to resize so these should be okay for icons, too. Brushes were made using PSP 9. PSP users can download the .jbr files, and for users of other programs there is an image pack available.

The brushes are larger than they appear in the preview.

Comments are lovely and credit is nice but not required, just send people my way when they ask where you got that brush, mmkay?
NO HOTLINKING.

Download: .jbr files | Download: image pack