DIGITAL PAINTING RESOURCES LINKS
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1001 FREE FONTS This site offers exactly what the title says. There is an enormous range of free fonts available, organised into such categories as 3D, Animal, Curly, Decorative, Famous, Horror, Medieval, Sci-Fi, Western and many more. The fonts are all presented with large, clear samples so that you can see exactly what they look like. They are compatible with both Windows and Macintosh.

3DM3.COM This is a resource of tutorials for Photoshop, Painter, Matte Painting, 3DS Max, Maya and other programs for creating digital images. The tutorials are detailed and presented with many illustrations on how to acheive the effects, and vary in difficulty from those suitable for beginners to advanced users. There is also an extensive gallery of 2D and 3D images created by various artists, which make the site worth a visit even if you are not interested in the tutorials.

3D TOTAL “The CG artist’s homepage” is an incredibly wide-ranging and useful resource for materials and information related to 3D computer graphics. As well as a wonderful gallery of 3D images there is a huge library of free, downloadable textures, reference photos and other useful materials and tutorials for a varied selection of 3D software.

ABOUT.COM SOFTWARE This site contains a large number of free downloads of brushes, custom shapes, layer styles, presets, utilties, templates, add-ons, palettes, and other resources for Adobe Photoshop. Many of these downloads (gradients, brushes, styles, shapes) can also be used in Photoshop Elements. Whatever you are looking for, this site is well worth a visit, and many of the downloads are of a very high quality.

ABSOLUTE BACKGROUND TEXTURES This site claims to have “the largest collection of background textures on the internet”, and I think it would be difficult to dispute the claim when you look at the number and range of textures available (over five and a half thousand). They are all seamlessly tiling, background textures for use on web pages, graphical software or on the desktop, are sorted by colour and motif, and are fully customizable.

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP TUTORIALS This is a collection of detailed and high-quality tutorials on all aspects of Adobe Photoshop. Many areas of designing, drawing, photo retouching and manipulation and special effects are covered, and the tutorials, by a number of different contributors and appealing to range of abilities, are fully illustrated with step-by-step illustrations.

BLENDER Blender is a completely free, open source 3D modelling and animation program available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. It is intended for design professionals and others who wish to become 3D artists, but it does take a lot of time and effort to learn how to use it. However, there are plenty of books and online tutorials available, so it is not difficult to find the guidance needed to get started, and the end results can be quite astounding.

BRUSHEEZY This site offers a wide range of free, downlodable brushes for Photoshop, as well as patterns and other resources. The brushes are all of a very high quality, and cover a huge range of subjects and effects from Fractals and Flowers to Grunge and Graffiti. You can see a preview of all the brushes in each set before you download them, so that you know exactly what you are getting.

DESIGN SHARD The creator of this site is Max Stanworth, whose purpose is “to produce a valuable resource for designers ranging from design tips, inspiration and free resources such as Photoshop brushes or textures to be downloaded.” The site contains a wealth of really useful tutorials and some very high-quality downloads.

DIGITAL ARTFORM This fascinating site is described as “Observations, experiments and rants on the production and practice of digital art. The open notebooks of Joseph Francis.” It contains written and video tutorials on a mixture of related subjects and examples of digital art and photography, as well as comments on various aspects of art in the world around us.

DW PHOTOSHOP TUTORIALS Developing Webs.Net contains a vast amount of information about creating and building a website. This section is concerned with tutorials on the use of Photoshop, covering Basic, Intermediate and Advanced Techniques, Text, Textures, Buttons, Animation, Plugins and Presets, and many more areas. The tutorials tend to be clear and succinct, with illustrations of the main stages of the work.

EASYELEMENTS As the name suggests, this is a collection of tutorials, tips and free downloads (brushes, textures, etc.) for Photoshop Elements. The site is run by Robert Redwood, a student, who claims to spend most of his spare time writing articles for the website, which does contain a lot of very useful material. He also produces a newsletter to which you can subscribe, and back issues are available on the site.

ESCRAPPERS This useful site has a commercial section selling epapers, layouts and kits, but it also has a collection of free textures and embellishments as well as many straightforward Photoshop tutorials on creating a wide range of simple effects and materials, many of which are geared to Photoshop Elements.

FREEBYTE’S GUIDE TO FREE GRAPHICS SOFTWARE Part of a much larger Freebyte site this is an extensive and very useful list of links to a whole variety of free graphics software with brief reviews and recommendations. The subjects covered include free paint, vector drawing, background-creation and desktop publishing programs, icon and cursor editors, image converters, viewers and optimizers, photo albums, animation software and many more.

IMAGE AFTER This site offers free high resolution textures of metals, floors, skin, wood, rock, walls, fabric, food, fur and many more. They are mostly photographic textures, and can all be freely downloaded and used in commercial or personal works. All the textures are in jpg format, ranging in size from 1600 x 1200 to 2560 x 1920, and most are raw, unprocessed, and sometimes even out of focus.

MORGUEFILE This is a fantastic resource of thousands of free, high quality photographs and textures which you are allowed to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt without attribution. They are divided into categories under headings such as people, textures, scenes and objects, and these are further divided into more specific sub-categories which can be browsed as thumbnails and downloaded as large image files useful for photo-manipulation projects.

PIXEL PAINT PAPERS This is a commercial American site for digital scrapbook paper and supplies, but it also contains an extensive selection of free papers for personal use which can be downloaded in high resolution for printing or low resolution for digital purposes. There are also some basic video tutorials on details of scrap booking for those new to the medium.

SIRIUS-SDZ Found on Deviant Art, this is an amazing collection of varied, large and high-quality textures which can be downloaded and used without any restrictions. The textures are organised in groups according to type and colour, and there are also zip-file packs of textures and source photos.

TUTORIAL CENTER This site contains links to tutorials on a wide range of programs, from 3D Studio Max and Adobe Photoshop to HTML coding and Xbox. The tutorials are by different people, and appear on a wide variety of sites, so they can vary in quality, but they generally tend to be quite detailed and easy to follow, with each step fully illustrated.

TU-TORIAL.COM This is one of many sites which collect together links to tutorials on digital art. This one divides them into the following categories: Photoshop, Flash, Web Development and Illustrator, though the vast majority of the tutorials are confined to Photoshop. To get to the actual tutorials you do have to click on two successive links, but they cater to all levels of expertise, and many of them are very good and detailed.

WEB DESIGN LIBRARY This is another site with a huge range of tutorials on many subjects, from Web Design Basics and Vector Graphics to 3D Graphics and Web Programming. The step-by-step tutorials are very easy to follow, and every step is fully illustrated with screen shots of settings and illustrations of what you should achieve.