The effect itself can be easily replicated using the layer styles built right in to Photoshop, follow these simple steps to create your own letterpress style text effect.

I’m sure we all remember painting with sponge (or potato!) stamps as a child, but back then we didn’t really appreciate the cool distressed effect the printing technique created. Today designers and illustrators strive to add that retro/vintage style to their work with textures, so in this tutorial we’ll cover the process of creating a cute kids style illustration complete with a vector sponge stamp effect.

Follow this step by step guide to creating a cool little skull and crossbones sticker design in Adobe Illustrator. This tutorial will hopefully be a great one for Illustrator beginners, as we’ll not only be creating the skull and crossbones design using all the important tools found in Illustrator, we’ll also be setting up the basic print document with bleeds and guides.

Follow this logo design process walkthrough to see the making of a cubist style logo design made up of lots of detailed vector facets. Not only will we be creating the actual design in Adobe Illustrator, but I’ll also be describing the whole logo design process in this tutorial, from the initial sketches right through to finishing off the final design.

Follow this step by step Illustrator tutorial to create a grumpy Internet troll character. We’ll start the process with a basic pencil sketch then build up a complete vector character design with linework, colour fills and basic shading to create a funny cartoon mascot.

I’ve always love browsing the amazing style of art known as Vexel illustration and recently I decided to finally give it a go myself. Follow this step by step tutorial for the making of my first vector art portrait of Tron Legacy’s Quorra. Learn how the portrait is carefully traced and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator to create an interesting vexel style design.

Follow this step by step post processing guide to give your photos a dark lomo style effect with high contrast, blue tones and vignette burns. The effect is based on the popular lomographic technique and is similar to the processing effect used in many fashion shots and advertisement designs. Overall this effect does a great job of adding impact to a plain photography with cool colour casts and unusual saturation.

’ve just finished up another little digital art experiment where I set out to build something cool and abstract out of Photoshop patterns and simple shapes. Follow this walkthrough as I take you through the steps I took to recreate this detailed design with nothing more than gradient and pattern effects.

 

Follow these steps in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create a range of vector shapes and graphics that can be combined into a great looking vector collage illustration. We’ll then finish off the illustration with some subtle touches of depth and detail, giving a polished graphic with hints of a retro-grunge style.


The header design here on Blog.SpoonGraphics has received many comments of praise and has been the subject of a good few questions and tutorial requests over the past year. So, I thought it was about time I created something which covers some of the processes of creating a similar graphic style. We’ll be using many of the same techniques I originally used in the website design, combined with some additional steps to create this neu-retro clean-grunge pop culture vector illustration.