Mels Brushes

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Posted by Mel on July 12, 2010  |  No Comments

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Pixlr editor – a must see free alternative to Photoshop

Posted by Mel on July 1, 2010  |  No Comments

You may have come across Pixlr, a very cool new browser based image editor. It has some amazing features to rival photoshop, and best of all it’s free and can be accessed wherever you have access to the net. The application loads fast and looks great. You can upload and edit images from your computer, or grab images from the net by pasting in a URL.

Pixlr has been developed by Ola Sevandersson, and in a short space of time seems to have grown rapidly in popularity, with over 19,000 fans on facebook. Great for people who don’t want to pay out for expensive image editing software – if you just need to resize your pics for facebook. Equally handy though for designers on the move!

Just some of the features include:

• Layers, including layer masks and basic layer styles
• A wide range of filters
• Custom Brushes
• Full colour adjustment tools
• Selection tools – lasso, magic wand etc
• Clone stamp, burn and dodge tools
• Red eye reduction
• Text
• Gradients
• Crop tool

Pixlr Custom Brushes

Pixlr allows you to use custom brushes. Some of these are built into the app, but you can also define and save your own, and upload them from your computer. I’ve created a set of Pixlr brushes from my Vector Stalks set for you to try out for free. Look out for more Pixlr brushes on Mels Brushes soon.

(This brush set is for Personal use only)

Down the Hole Again

Posted by Mel on June 19, 2010  |  No Comments

Just to let you know, I will be away from Monday 21st for a week for my yearly stint working and  VJ-ing in the Rabbit Hole at Glastonbury. Any enquiries will be answered once I’ve recovered..
Can’t wait – really hope its not a muddy one! Come visit the Hole at the top of the park field if youre going to be there, I’ll be the one in the DJ booth hunched over a laptop…

Easter Sale – 50% off everything in the shop

Posted by Mel on April 5, 2010  |  No Comments

I’ve been having an Easter sale in my shop – and totally forgot to post it here on my blog. Doh. All the chocolate must have affected my brain.. The sale was supposed to finish today, but I have now extended it until Wednesday 7th April.  Go grab some bargains! Hope you have all had a nice weekend.

Facebook – new Mels Brushes page

Posted by Mel on March 23, 2010  |  No Comments

Join Mels Brushes on facebook, you can now go to this new page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mels-Brushes/110947465588151?ref=ts and click become a fan. Thanks and I hope to catch up with you  soon!

11 Cubecart premium skin resources

Posted by Mel on February 26, 2010  |  No Comments

If you own a Cubecart ecommerce store or are setting one up, you may find that decent off the peg templates or ‘skins’ are few and far between. Below I have gathered together and reviewed a list of places to start looking. There is a lot of potential for great design for Cubecart skins, just as already exists with WordPress, but I do feel there is a way to go yet.  Hopefully we will see more quality skin designers appearing over the coming year, as I believe there is a big market for them. Please comment if you know of any really good ones that I’ve missed, or have ideas about what sort of skins you would like to see designers making.

CubeCart Forums – Try this first for loads of commercial skins posted by different designers. It has the advantage of being chronological, so the newest skins appear first! Lots of talent to be found here if you delve..

Cubecart Skin Store – Lovely clean and simple skin designs, probably my favourite of the bunch. Price for a V4 skin is £15.50. Live demo not working for all of the skins though. They also offer skin installation at a very reasonable £5.00 or another £10.00 for doing it within one working day. You can your skin tweaked too, for which you email with details to get a quote.

Kiss My Cart – Offers a choice of 18 version 3 skins and 23 version 4. The site is clear and easy to navigate, and you can see a live demo of the skins in action.

CC Skins – These skins have  good simple layouts – they would probably make a  good base to customize yourself if you have the CSS and html skills. Also offers a live demo of the skins by using the dropdown skin selector box.

Shop Dev – Offers only 4 skins, but of high quality. The Sandbox V4 skin in particular has a great clean web 2.0 feel to it and a versatile backend.

PT Templates – Offer 3 different skins in a few colourways for v3 and 4. These are a bit more pricey starting at around $80. Clean useable designs.

Cubecart Style – Clean designs and low prices starting at £9.99. Also on offer for FREE is a popular and well designed Crisp White skin, which i believe is for V3.

Cart Designs – Somewhat confusing and cluttered site, they offer 5 version 4 skins in different colourways ranging from £9.99 to £29.99, and around 12 version 3 themes. Unfortunately you can’t see a live demo of the skins in action which is a bit of a downside. However they do offer some useful modifications and will install and host your store for you.

CC3.biz – 47  V3 skins, but only 5 V4. Another slightly old fashioned looking site with skins of variable quality. However it is worth a delve around – there are some gems to be found. I particularly like this Rugged Western V4 skin – it’s fairly graphics heavy, which makes it stand out from the crowd. Prices are in Euros,  skins cost €25.00 – €35.00

Demon Templates – There are ten V4 three column designs but no two column ones, selling at £14.99. They are fairly basic – and currently the live demo isn’t working. Lots more version 3 skins, ranging from £9 – £15, but the designs are a little uninspiring and out of date.

Estelles Mod Store – This site supposedly offers skins as well as mods, but i couldnt find any. The range of mods though is great, offering addons such as contact forms and wishlists. A good one to go back to once you have your basic store up and running.

Finally, if you would like to have go at customising an existing cubecart skin, check out this article by cubecrab.co.uk, or this quick guide at cubecart.com

Digital Scrapbooking sites – Mega List of links

Posted by Mel on February 22, 2010  |  12 Comments

For all you fans of digital scrapbooking, I have put together this huge list of sites and stores online in alphabetical order. It’s completely amazing how many are out there! If your favourite digital scrapbook site isn’t here, please comment below with your link.

Picture created with images from Peaceful Mountain, Autumn Garden and Bedouin Circus

3Scrapateers

A Cherry on Top Digital Shoppe

After Five Designs

Aimee Asher Elite Studios

Atomic Cupcake

Bello Scarto

Bits ‘N’ Bobs

Blue Bazaar

Blushbutter digital scrapbooking and printed papers

Bon Scrapatit Designs

CatScrap

CraftCrave and DigiFree Scrapbooking Freebies

Cute Creations Design

Keep reading..!

How to make great colour palettes

Posted by Mel on February 10, 2010  |  No Comments

Here’s a way to make easy palettes from your favourite photos.

Photoshop Instructions

Open Any Photo You Want
Use the Single Row Marquee Tool & Select a Single Pixel Row
Transform (CTRL+T) & Stretch to Full Height
Then Use Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush

So you can just take a photo with good colours and reduce it to a nice palette. I’ve been having lots of fun doing this. Here’s one i made earlier with this pic of my son mucking about..

And this is the palette I took from it by using the eyedropper tool to pick out the ‘key’ colours.

I like it because you get nice natural harmonizing palettes with very little time and effort! You can see more of my palettes on www.colourlovers.com

Learn how to create and save a custom photoshop palette here

Cube in a Cube – Henry Hate’s ice tattoo

Posted by Mel on February 10, 2010  |  No Comments

This new art installation in London caught my attention. Yesterday celebrity tattooist Henry Hate unveiled his first ever sculpture and the world’s first ice tattoo in a creative partnership for the launch of Nissan Cube. On the banks of the river Thames sits an enormous 2.4m x 2.6m and eight tonne block of ice with a Nissan Cube frozen inside. It took 8000 litres of water, filtered then frozen for 240 days, and sculpted with Japanese Samurai chisels. It’s pretty impressive – and made me wonder whether the car will still work when the ice has melted! The car inside has been the subject of a fair amount of controversy too, with a facebook group devoted to talking about its.. shall we say.. ‘unique’ design. Like Marmite, you either love it or hate it. Apparently it already has a cult status in Japan. I saw one yesterday, and it was turning heads – which i guess is what some people want in a car.

The sculpture, which is beautifully lit from the inside, is covered with an intricate design by Hate. The art installation has an interactive sensor panel which allows you to light up parts of the tattoo design. The interactive panel also provides information on how the art project came into being, as well as the design aspects of the Nissan Cube.

If you get a chance, it’s well worth the trip to take a look. Unless the weather changes for the warmer i guess it will be there for a while to come.. In the meantime there is discussion, more photos and news on the Nissan Cube facebook group.

Free Illustrator repeat patterns

Posted by Mel on January 13, 2010  |  No Comments

Free repeat pattern swatches for Illustrator. As I have lots of these single patterns lying around, I decided to share them. To use them, first put the .ai file into your Illustrator > Presets > Swatches folder. Open illustrator, then click on the flyout menu arrow in the swatches palette and on Open Swatch Library. The pattern will be in that list to use as a fill in your designs.

See all the patterns in the Free Illustrator Patterns category

So how do you use them? Rather than write a tutorial, I will direct you to read BittBox’s excellent guide to the many ways of using illustrator patterns.