www.blog.spoongraphics.co.uk Tutorials

How To Build a Vector Clock Graphic
If you're looking to develop your Illustrator skills, here's a tutorial for you! Follow this walkthrough to see the how adding layer after layer of vector shapes, along with a range of gradients and a spot of texture can quickly create a great looking icon-style clock graphic.

How to Build a Custom Wordpress Theme from Scratch
If you're confident with your CSS and HTML, its not hard at all to step up to the challenge of building a custom Wordpress theme. This overview shows the process of how my latest custom Wordpress theme was built from design concept through to completed theme. See how the static design is split up into the various Wordpress theme files, and discover how the simple PHP snippets can add that dynamic functionality of a blog.

How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design
One of the great things about designing with vector shapes is that any design, especially characters, can be developed out of basic shapes, giving a simple and stylized style. Lets get busy with Adobe Illustrator and design a cute bear character and surrounding scenery in just two colors, ready for use as a cool t shirt design.

Design a Colorful Retro Futuristic Poster
The theme of retro futurism combines digitally created graphics and abstract shapes with distressed and aged textures, giving that cool mix of old and new. Lets take a look at how to create our own bright and colorful retro futuristic poster in Photoshop, using dynamic lines, vibrant gradients and rough textures to build up the design layer after layer.

How To Create a Detailed Apple iPad Icon
An iPad icon would be a sensible addition to any web designers resources toolbox, so let's fire up Photoshop and create our very own detailed iPad icon graphic .

How To Create a Retro Apple Wallpaper
Follow these simple steps in Photoshop to create a homage to Apple, combining the retro striped Apple logo with a range of soft grungy textures to produce a detailed design with subtle touches of colour and tone.

Handy Techniques for Cutting Out Hair
When trimming out images in Photoshop, human hair or animal fur always proves troublesome and can be tricky to achieve a realistic look. Here are two techniques I use on images with both plain backgrounds, and those with a varied background tones, each achieving pretty decent end results.

How to Create a Textured Grungy 3D Type Design
A great looking design can be easily created by combining various textures and brushes. In this tutorial we'll look at creating a cool grungy design based around some abstract 3D type, then apply a few finishing touches to really bring the design to life.

Create a Rolling Stones Inspired Tongue Illustration
The bright red Rolling Stones tongue and lips logo is a graphic design icon, and has been a pop culture fav for years! I don't think you can beat it, so well not create a direct copy of the original in this tut. Instead, lets take a look at drawing our own Stones inspired tongue graphic, starting with a quick pencil sketch and finishing with a vector based graphic in Adobe Illustrator.

How to Create a Crafts Inspired Vector Kids
Learn how to create a couple of cute and simple kids illustrations of a car and airplane using Adobe Illustrators basic shapes. Take inspiration from hand crafted artwork to give each graphic a plaid effect fabric texture and stitching effect .

Design a Vibrant Blackberry Inspired Ad
The Blackberry Loves U2 TV promo features some awesome, bright and vibrant lighting effects. Lets take a look at recreating the style to produce a Blackberry inspired design of our own .

Create a Cute Vector Monster from a Pencil Sketch
Follow this Adobe Illustrator walkthrough on the creation of a cute little vector monster character, beginning with a quick pencil sketch on paper.

How to Combine Pixel and Vector to Produce Striking Artwork
Design project walkthrough explaining how to create impactful graphic artwork with pixel and vector.

Monster Character Series Part 1 - Flying Bat Ghost
How to create a set of simple monster characters. Hopefully these will be easy enough to follow by Illustrator beginners, with mostly the basic tools and shapes being used.