So October 31st is coming closer and so are the yearly obligations for graphic designers. Ah yes, Halloween design – how much we love this time of the year! Friends call and ask for Halloween invitations. Your client remembers that it’s only 10 days until he has to throw that party – and asks you to design some Halloween cards real quick. And have them printed yesterday please. So where to go for all those clichés that people want in a Halloween design? Well, here comes Beeex.net, your collection of strictly free resources for graphic designers and web developers. And today, we have collected some great Halloween design resources for you. For that last-minute call for a professional Halloween graphic. We have searched and listed a total of 35 Halloween design resources for the ambitioned designer: Halloween icons, Photoshop brushes, free Halloween vector art, and of course, free fonts. Some might want to rather refer to some of the features as “Halloween Clip Art” – that’s fine. Some graphic designers tend to turn up their noses at anything clipart in general – these are meant to inspire you, friends! So be nice. We’ve also collected some Halloween ideas for you: Halloween wallpapers and backgrounds. You can either use these for inspiration, or to scary up your computer desktop. And finally, we found some great Halloween tutorials for Photoshop, which will take you through the steps of designing some spooky Halloween invitations and cards. So here goes: Let’s cut to the chase and come up with some great Halloween design today! Fire up Photoshop, fire up Illustrator, get creative! Halloween Design Please note the user license for each of the following design resources. While they are all free, some come with a restricted usage license – e.g. for commercial work. So before you download a resource, please read the license that is usually noted on the download page. Halloween Icons Halloween icons that will make your desktop applications look really really scary. Make no mistake – don’t call this clip art. Halloween clip art is for milk drinkers. Halloween icons are for graphic desingers. 1/ Halloween Monsters The nice people at Turbomilk have put together a great and very appealing set of cute little Halloween monsters. This Halloween clip art goes by the name of “monstroworld icons” and is intended to replace your usual desktop icons. And indeed, they look great! Go fetch these Halloween icons – for Mac OS X and Windows, or as PNG files – right here. 2/ Halloween Avatars/Smileys Again, the word most suitable for these Halloween icons is “cute” rather than “scary”. Maybe “scary sweet”? At least that’s an alliteration. You can use these 20 nice, shiny and glossy 3D-style icons for anything you like, they come in GIF, ICO, and ICNS formats. Thanks to deleket on Deviant Art! Grab these Halloween icons here. 3/ Jack O’ Lantern & Harry Potter’s Hat The Jack O’ Lantern is an American tradition and belongs in your window when the kids arrive, or they will make you suffer for your ignorance. Unless you have Harry Potter by your side to wave his magic wand at them and turn them into Jack O’ Lanterns themselves. With this free icon pack, you have both: download it here from Icon Drawer (you have to scroll down on the page a bit). 4/ Bloody Halloween Icons These are actually two sets of bloody Halloween icons – one contains such things as knives, both with blood splatters on them and without, and the other spoils us with the Halloween mask from Scary Movie. Or was it Scream? Either way, you can find both free icon sets on this page. 5/ Halloween Icons Collection by The Iconfactory These are five different sets of Halloween icons made by the Icon factory (a great site!). You have to click on each of the above 5 thumbnails to go to these pages. They are named as follows: 1/ Spooky Halloween Stickers (pumpkin), 2/ World of Aqua – After Dark (black cat), 3/ Vintage Halloween (scary masks), 4/ Glossy Halloween Food (pumpkin), 5/ Haunted Hard Drives (haunted hard drive). Great addition to our Halloween design freebies by The Iconfactory. Check them out! Halloween Photoshop Brushes This is a great addition to our Photoshop brushes category! We have collected these really nice design brushes for Photoshop – all ready for free download and, of course, spooky spooky. Just the right Halloween stuff for you. 6/ Horror Photoshop Brushes Want to hang someone? Maybe place them in a scary horror ambient surrounding, along with a skull or two? Download these free Photoshop Halloween brushes by Emma Alvarez and you’re set. 7/ Assorted Halloween Brushes A set of quite pessimistic Photoshop Halloween brushes is featured on Brusheezy. Very R.I.P. style. Download this set here. 8/ Vintage Halloween Brushes A nice set of vintage Halloween brushes arrives from 500ml brushes. We gave you free vintage textures earlier, and this Photoshop brush kit is a great addition – especially since it’s Halloween themed! You can go there here. 9/ Zombie Photoshop Brushes Zombies! Aaah! Halloween. Ah. Nuff said – go get ‘em. 10/ Photoshop Spider Brushes Thanks to the graphic designer Scully, we are blessed with these wonderful creatures in the form of dedicated Photoshop Brushes. We are on our knees – you can download this set here. 11/ Cobweb Photoshop Brushes It is only logical to also feature cobwebs now. Because – since we are so much in love with Halloween, we simply can’t get around it. You can download these Photoshop brushes here. 12/ Deathbat Photoshop Brushes What’s a deathbat? Simple – a bat with a skull as its head. Or, from the skull’s perspective which we don’t want to neglect, a deathbat is a flying skull with bat wings. So here come some great Photoshop deathbat Brushes for you, perfect for Halloween! Download them here (thanks RiseAboveArt). 13/ Cliché Halloween Photoshop Brushes These Photoshop brushes are great for various Halloween designs, as the set contains a lot of clichés – and that’s what the people want, isn’t it? Download it here (thanks to Anodyne). 14/ Eerie Photoshop Brushes A wonderful set that goes well with that love serenade you plan to sing to your beloved one. Really. This Photoshop brush set includes a full moon, gravestones, and more cute things for your Halloween design. Download it here (thanks to wyckedBrush) 15/ Old City Photoshop Brushes Ruins deluxe – this Photoshop brush pack gives you the ability to use dark buildings and places in your Halloween invitations. Go for it here. 16/ Spooky Halloween Design Brushes This is a Photoshop Brush set by the same author as #15 – this time, Anodyne designed a pack of spooky Photoshop Halloween design brushes for use in your artwork. Great stuff, download it here. 17/ Devil Wings for Halloween Above, we had the deathbats – now it’s time for the deathbat’s uncle, the devil himself. Or herself. Depends on your view of things. Nevermind our joking – these Photoshop brushes are perfect for Halloween! Download them here (thanks to austral-azn). Free Halloween Vector Art We love free vectors. And we know you love them too! So of course we have to feature some great free Halloween vector art graphics for free download, and ready to use in your designs. Here they come. 18/ Free Vector Skulls These are some very cool free vector skulls that fit perfectly with any Halloween design. Since they come as vector art, you can of course enlarge them and cover your house up with the printout. Provided you have a decent sized piece of paper handy. Thanks to Ben from Benblogged for these – go to his download page here! 19/ Free Vector Vintage This is a nice set of free vector vintage art for use with Adobe Illustrator (or any other vector application). The free download includes skulls, wings, splatters, and even swirls and swooshes that actually fit quite well with a vintage Halloween design. Go check these free vectors out here. 20/ Free Halloween Vectors A nice little set of three free vector graphics can be found over at Vecteezy. These free Halloween vectors consist of a witch hat and two carved pumpkins – one glowing, one in its natural form. Well, if you consider Jack O’ Lantern natural, that is. You can download this kit here. 21/ Free Vector Zombies A nice set of free vector zombies, perfect for Halloween, that are rather funny than anything else. They are by Benblogged, and you can download them here. 22/ Free Vector Silhouettes Another free vector pack by Ben, also for Halloween, only this time the zombies are silhouettes. Very nice work – you can use them for Halloween backgrounds, for instance. Download these free vectors here. 23/ Free Vector Zombie Heads Zombies rock. That’s why we feature yet another free vector art pack of them; this time, they are the heads only. Really scary, and just perfect for any Halloween design you could imagine. Check this one out here (thanks to Spoongraphics). Free Halloween Fonts Free fonts have a tradition here at Beeex.net. One of our earliest successful posts was about free pixel fonts, which we featured for direct download – go check it out if you haven’t yet! And today, we’ve got some great free Halloween font collections for you. So you’ll find multiple – read trunkload full of – free fonts for Halloween and other scary occasions on the following sites. 24/ Free Halloween Fonts at Urban Fonts Urban Fonts has a collection of free Halloween fonts that come as dingbats. So you won’t be able to write anything with them, but if you use Adobe Illustrator, you can use these free fonts to make paths and then use the illustrations as vector graphics! Just a thought. Check out this nice collection of free Halloween fonts on this page. 25/ Free Horror Fonts You may know DaFont already – they are a great site for free fonts. So here’s their collection of free horror fonts that work wonders when creating Halloween designs. The horror font section on DaFont can be found here, and then you might also want to check out their free Halloween fonts – go there here! Halloween Wallpapers and Pictures So you are in need of some inspiration. Look no further, but stick with us. We have a few cool free Halloween wallpapers for you, along with a few free Halloween pictures that you can use in your Halloween designs. 26/ Grim Reaper A classic. What is a Halloween without the grim reaper? Christmas! So here you get a huge-sized image of a grim reaper for use in your Halloween design. You can go to the page here (thanks to mjranum). 27/ Black Crows (PSD) This is a free hi-res Photoshop image of four black crows by CatONineTales on DeviantArt. You can use the birds in your Halloween design to provide that certain dark feeling… You know. Download this PSD right here. 28/ Scary Halloween Wallpaper These are two scary Halloween wallpapers for your computer desktop that look great – and can give your inspiration that push it needed very desperately. These desktop wallpapers over at GoMedia can be found at the bottom of this page – at the top, you’ll also find a free vector Halloween pack! 29/ Halloween Wallpaper A great set of free Halloween wallpapers can be found here. Your desktop will never look the same! You can go see for yourself – and download – right here. Halloween Photoshop Tutorials (and Illustrator) And finally, after all these freebies, here’s the section that will teach you how to create your own Halloween pictures. Learn how to make something ugly out of something beautiful, if you want to call it that way. These Halloween Photoshop tutorials will show you how! Watch out for the occasional Illustrator tutorial as well. 30/ Illustrator Tutorial – Create a Halloween Pumpkin In this Illustrator tutorial by Nick La, you’ll learn how easy it actually is to create a vector pumpkin in Adobe Illustrator. The result can be seen above – and you can visit this Halloween tutorial right here. 31/ Halloween Pumpkin Photoshop Tutorial And while we’re at it, why not see what we can do in good old Adobe Photoshop. This Halloween pumpkin Photoshop tutorial shows you how to make a very evil Jack O’ Lantern in your favorite design application. Go to this tutorial here. 32/ Halloween Photoshop Tutorial – Create a Zombie In this Halloween Photoshop tutorial, you take any picture (of yourself, or of your beloved ones) and turn it into a horror image of a zombie. You’ll be using some interesting Photoshop techniques, so be sure to check this one out. Right here. 33/ Photoshop Tutorial – Old Face Take a picture of a beautiful young woman and turn it into a cracked, old, peely artwork – that’s exactly what this Photoshop tutorial does. You can learn some great techniques here. Go see for yourself right here. 34/ Photoshop Tutorial – Portrait to Stone Statue Take a portrait and turn it into a stone statue – that’s what this Photoshop tutorial is about. Again, a wonderful addition to any Halloween design! Go see this tutorial here. 35/ Photoshop Tutorial – Charming Landscape to Horror Site And finally, one of the best photo manipulation tutorials for Photoshop that we didn’t want to leave out of this list for Halloween design. Learn how to turn a charming landscape image into a charming horror site – you can find this Photoshop tutorial here (it has been featured on Beeex.net before). There you have it, our shortlist of 35 designer resources for Halloween design. Halloween icons, Halloween clip art, Halloween Photoshop brushes, free Halloween vectors, Halloween wallpapers, and finally, Halloween Photoshop tutorials. What a mouthful. We can’t say this word anymore today. Hopefully, you find these resources useful. We would love to hear back from you – leave us a comment if you like! So long – and: booooooooo! - ~Beeex Happy Team

While we’re working hard on writing the last lines on our next post, we noticed that we hadn’t properly welcomed our new site sponsors and affilliates yet. As you know, Beeex.net features only the best strictly free resources for graphic designers and web developers, and our work wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors and referrals. So we would like to take this opportunity and introduce our readers to some great stuff out there – that won’t necessarily cost you something, but can even earn you some money. This is the great thing about being in graphic design and web development. There are lots of opportunities you can use to make a decent buck – without having a solid client base: Buy and Sell Wordpress Themes Are you a web designer? Do you work with Wordpress? If not, you should look into it. Beeex.net runs on the Wordpress platform, as do millions of other blogs and even corporate websites. But you know this already if you’re a web designer. So here comes ThemeForest. ThemeForest is an online marketplace for Wordpress themes and website templates. You can buy and sell themes not only for Wordpress, but also HTML/CSS templates, Joomla templates, and Drupal themes. On the buyer side, prices start at $10 for an already decent theme. This is a great price considering you get a full website template for it. On the seller side, you can place your templates on the ThemeForest marketplace and earn money off of them. ThemeForest takes a percentage of the price the buyers pay – there are no other fees or initial costs. Take a look if you’re a web designer and you have one or two (or more) extra templates lying around! ThemeForest – buy and sell site templates Make Money with your Blog Do you have a blog? If so, check out Netklix. They have advertisers in many niches that are willing to pay you money if you place their ad on your site – and you don’t have to worry about getting them to advertise on your blog, putting ads up, or billing your advertisers; Netklix does all of this for you. Simply sign up as a publisher (use this link, then go to “Publisher”) to create an account. After you signed up (free), created an ad space and verified your account ($5 fee), you can start earning money right away. Netklix – earn money from your website or blog Learn from the best: Vibr8 Bros. Design Blog The Vibr8 Brothers are graphic & web designers “deluxe”. They run a great site featuring free vector art, design tutorials (for both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator), Wordpress tutorials, and much more; we highly recommend you check them out! You can also find some of their design freebies in our regular blog features, which is independent from any sponsorship. Vibr8bros.com – Design Vibr8ions from the Bros. Interested in becoming a Sponsor? If you have a product or service for people in the graphic design and web design field, bloggers and freelancers, and you want to enhance your website or your brand awareness, consider becoming a sponsor on Beeex.net. We are growing day by day and would be happy to welcome you to our site! You can read more about becoming a sponsor on this page. Up next on Beeex.net: Well, you know how it goes. It’s a secret until it’s up What we can say is that it will be another full feature of what we do best: giving you only the best strictly free resources for graphic designers and web developers. If you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed yet, click here to do it now and never miss another post! Yours truly, ~ Beeex Happy Team

Just a couple of minutes ago, we discovered that all 10 anchor links we had placed in the last post, 77 essential Photoshop Techniques for creating photo-realistic textures, are broken and lead to 404 pages. Shame on us for not finding out earlier… And we still don’t know why! On quick sight, they look as if they are good and they should be working. Now this is not the case for the links to the Photoshop tutorials (or any other resources), just the anchor links within the page. And that is now fixed! We edited the post and took out the anchor links. If they had worked, they would have taken you to the corresponding part in the post. We thought we’d offer a form of easy navigation because it’s such a long list… Oh well. We are sorry if you encountered any difficulties and ended up on a 404 page. If you see something wrong on our site, please do tell us by either leaving a comment or just send us a quick message, we’d appreciate it! Thank you for your patience and again, we’re sorry and we hope you still enjoy our site Yours truly, ~ Beeex Happy Team

It is well known in graphic design that texture is a necessity in many types of artwork. In our previous post about textures, where we featured 47 free textures – packs, kits and websites for textures of all types and colors (do take a look if you haven’t seen that post yet!), we collected the best free textures, seamless background patterns, pattern generators, and free backgrounds that you are able to download and either appy as-is to your website (or computer desktop), or use them in your graphic designs. Today, we’re taking textures one step further with 77 Photoshop Techniques for creating photo-realistic Textures from scratch. There are 77 Photoshop techniques and Illustrator tutorials across 10 categories. Photoshop Textures It is always good to know how to create Photoshop textures from scratch. Especially if you want to make the texture as realistic as possible, you’ve got to have some skills. You will not always find a decent free texture around – although the post mentioned above should help to prevent that in most cases -, or you might not always find exactly what you’re looking for. Why should you be familiar with these Photoshop techniques? You don’t have to rely on third party artwork You don’t have to credit third party work because it’s your own You don’t have to pay for resources You learn to work with texture more You improve your workflow You improve the quality of your artwork You are far more flexible You can use the exact texture or pattern you want You learn a bunch with these Photoshop tutorials – techniques that you can apply to all your artwork You become a better designer with better and more skills We’re sure you will find a lot more reasons for making use of these Photoshop techniques we present to you. These techniques are just what they sound like – solid, sometimes very quick and basic, and other times quite sophisticated and advanced Photoshop techniques. Not only for creating textures, but for using them as new skills on every one of your artworks; adapt, transform, merge, create, design! A word in advance The following collection of 77 Photoshop Techniques for Textures features Photoshop tutorials, and we also added a few great Illustrator tutorials on some textures. That’s because sometimes, you want to create the same design in Adobe Illustrator (which is part of Adobe Creative Suite anyway) – for a variety of reasons. If you are one of the people who like to use Illustrator in your designs, you will know what we are talking about Whenever it’s an Illustrator technique, it’s noted as such. Some tutorials are video tutorials. Also in this case, you will find a little note stating that. We did not attempt to collect the entire internet. We made an effort to search and put together for you a collection of only the best Photoshop tutorials and Illustrator tutorials on creating textures, patterns and backgrounds – from scratch. That means that none of the following techniques uses stock photography or free textures that you have to download in advance. That’s the point of this post: to show you how to create your own photo-realistic textures from scratch. And finally, one more thing: Sometimes, you will find a Photoshop tutorial on creating a text with that texture, for example. In these few cases, we featured the tutorial only because of the creation of the texture in Photoshop (thus it’s a Photoshop technique), and the tutorial itself continues with further steps to apply that texture to an object or another piece. Just remember that the main goal is to create your own Photoshop textures! Let’s get to it. Photoshop Techniques: Metal Textures Let’s start with some cool brushed, shiny, but also dirty Metal textures. 1/ Brushed Metal Tutorial This Photoshop technique teaches you how to create a brushed metal surface that looks like Aluminium. In the tutorial, you are creating a metal plate with nutbolts – now you don’t need to do the exact same thing, just take the Photoshop techniques used for creating metal . Test this technique for yourself right here. 2/ Stained Metal Photoshop Tutorial From our reader Jones Hansen at 0tutor.com comes 2nd Photoshop technique for creating brushed metal in Photoshop. It’s slightly different to the above one – you’ll have to find out for yourself which technique serves you better. Go to the page here! 3/ Metal Swirls This is a great little tutorial for creating metallic swirls in Photoshop. Swooshes, seeds and swirls are very popular anyway in today’s graphic designs – check out how to make them metallic right here! 4/ Brushed Metal Illustrator Tutorial This is some decent metal for your favorite vector art application, Adobe Illustrator. The advantages of vector art (Illustrator graphics) over raster graphics (Photoshop psd) is that you can scale the former indefinitely. A virtue any graphic designer should value. Check out this great brushed metal texture tutorial right here. 5/ Brushed Metal in Illustrator 2 – Video Tutorial Yet another Illustrator tutorial on creating a brushed metal texture. A different technique that you will want to take a look at. This is an Illustrator video tutorial by Layers Magazine and you should really try it for yourself. 6/ Rust Texture This is an excellent Photoshop technique and an absolute must to know about. This rust tutorial is not long or complicated, but the effect you get is stunning and really worth a look! 7/ Rusty Metal Texture Another Photoshop technique on creating rusty metal, this tutorial is also quick and shows you how to design a rather homogeneous texture. So while #6 above creates a unique and eye-catching grunge texture, this technique is better for dark backgrounds that you wish not to stand out so much. Go there here. 8/ Grunge Metal Rust Speaking about rust, we couldn’t leave this technique out. The Photoshop effect is quite stunning and while the artist uses this metal rust texture for text, you don’t have to – just adapt the Photoshop technique for any of your designs. Check it out here. 9/ Gold Effect in Photoshop Bling bling, aaight? Not just for the street but for stunning Photoshop effects, this technique comes in handy. You don’t even have to make it golden, but you can also make this effect bronze, silver, or whatever you like. Try this quick ‘n easy Photoshop effect out right here. Photoshop Techniques: Grunge Textures Grunge is popular: dirty, destroyed, ripped, torn, whatever. Here are some excellent Photoshop techniques to accomplish this type of texture. 10/ Photoshop Grunge Splats What do you call these? We thought grunge splats is the most suitable term, but you could also call them grungy clouds or so. The point is, this Photoshop technique should be in every graphic designer’s portfolio. What’s happening in this huge tutorial over at psdtuts is creating a wallpaper with a retro logo on it – we’re not looking for that (although it’s cool too), but we want the Photoshop technique to create this effect. Check it out here. 11/ Grunge Plate Metal and rust again??? Well yeah, kind of, but this time we chose to classify it as a Photoshop grunge technique and not as a metal technique. This excellent tutorial takes you from creating grunge textures from scratch to applying it to an artwork – in this case, a decaying metal sign. That’s the only connection to “metal” here. But why don’t you go and see for yourself! 12/ Grunge Stone Wall A grunge stone wall Photoshop technique that is rather difficult to read, because the tutorial is an image and the type consists of pixel fonts, but this is still a very valuable and excellent skill. You can go there here. 13/ Dirty Stone Text Again, we’re not looking to copy this Photoshop technique 1:1, but rather to learn about how to create the stone effect in the first place. This tutorial does a pretty good job at that and in the end, you can apply the stone texture to any one of your artworks. Check it out here. 14/ Photoshop Grain Tutorial A poor little teddy bear has to bear the designer’s doings in this Photoshop grain tutorail. Basically, it’s not about the toy though, but about the technique of using and applying Adobe’s grain filters. Check this piece out here. 15/ How to create Grunge Photoshop Brushes This quick tutorial shows you a technqiue for creating grunge Photoshop brushes, which you can save and use anytime to apply nice and destroyed grunge textures to your artwork. Photoshop brushes serve well as a tool to apply texture in any way; be sure to view this tutorial here. 16/ Grunge Texture Surface This is a wonderful Photoshop tutorial on creating a grunge texture surface from scratch. It’s by Stefan Morrell and aimed at 3D game designers – in fact, if you follow this technique, you’re going to create a cool grunge texture for a bunker hatch or so! Nevertheless, Stefan uses some great Photoshop techniques and shows them to us right here. Photoshop Techniques: Nature Nature is all around us (should be, anyway…). From wood and trees over rocks to grass, clouds, and snow, here are the Photoshop techniques to create these things and much more. 17/ Wood Texture If you’d like to create your own wood texture with Adobe Photoshop, then this tutorial is for you. It calls itself the “Ultimade Wood Texture Tutorial”, and as it’s from psdtuts, the tutorial finished off by being branded with their logo – but it’s entirely about creating a realistic wood texture of any size, and an excellent Photoshop tutorial in any case. Go check it out here! 18/ Wood Plate Texture This Photoshop technique is slightly different from the above wood texture, and it too can produce stunning results. You could use it, for instance, for mocking up a presentation of your work on the computer – for instance business cards: Don’t have a good wooden table around? Just take a picture and apply the wood texture yourself with this technique. Go to this tutorial right here. 19/ Illustrator Wood Tutorial This Illustrator tutorial shows you how to create wood texture in your favorite vector art program. The tutorial on vectips goes about designing that uneven grainy look – you can then apply the wood texture to your vector illustrations in various ways! It’s not a hard technique at all, and very good to know about. Go there here. 20/ Tree Texture Illustrator Video Tutorial Want to create a neat looking tree trunk illustration? This excellent video tutorial shows you a very handy Illustrator technique that you can not only apply to wood textures, but also to everything else. Go watch this Illustrator video tutorial right here. 21/ Rock Texture Extremely realistic results can be achieved with this Photoshop technique for creating a solid rock surface. This texture can then be used for a variety of things, from grunge overlays to dark backgrounds for your website. Go check out this excellent Photoshop technique on creating rock texture right over here. 22/ Rock Texture 2 This Photoshop effect also produces amazing results that look very realistic. With this method for creating rock texture, you are able to create more depth and a different texture altogether. Go test this technique for yourself – right here. 23/ Creating Stones In Photoshop This is a quick Photoshop technique for creating many single stones. The author of the tutorial uses type to apply this effect to, but you’re not limited to that, of course, Think creating a landscape image with a little creek running through, and with a free path, define the outline of a field of stones. Then use this technique to give them a realistic rock texture. Go see this Photoshop technique right here! 24/ Photoshop Marble Tutorial As easy and as quick as you can create marble with this Photoshop technique, you might already know it and use it in your graphic designs. It’s one of the easier tutorials, but nevertheless gives you exactly what you want: a marble texture of your own. Go to this tutorial right here. 25/ Grass Texture Very nice, very realistic grass textures can be created with this Photoshop technique. Again, if you knew it already, it’s nothing new; but for those who didn’t know how to do it yet, this will make your eyes pop. The tutorial also has a free download of the Photoshop psd in the end! Go check out this excellent Photoshop technique right over here. 26/ Turf Textures Want to design a sports field, or an arena? Maybe a football field? Go ahead and try this simple Photoshop technique on creating even grass, or turf texture. The tutorial even shows you how to design that kind of huge text (usually the team logo) that is usually colored grass. Go see for yourself here. 27/ Mud Texture Thinking about doing something muddy? Use this Photoshop technique to create some mud! You could also call this peat texture, rather than mud texture, but it remains a good technique to design the look and feel of this stuff. Remember, it’s about the Photoshop technique, so do play around with colors if you like – no need to keep it gray. Go see this tutorial here. 28/ Realistic Clouds in Photoshop Sure you know the Photoshop filter “clouds”. Sure you know what it does – but how make them realistic? Most of the time, if you don’t know how to use this tool correctly, you’ll end up with a soup of white stuff that maybe only your dog identifies as clouds. Use this Photoshop technique to create realistic clouds instead. Go there here. 29/ Photoshop Ice Tutorial This nice & quick Photoshop ice tutorial explains how to create ice with icicles using your favorite graphic design application. The tutorial uses text to show you the effect, but you can apply this effect to just about any object you imagine. Go check it out here. 30/ Make Snow in Photoshop Learn how to make frost and snow in Photoshop with this Photoshop technique of clothing any image or photograph into a cold and snow-white version. You can use landscape images – this is what the tutorial shows you (this Photoshop technique does work best on scenic photos, such as trees or bushes – but you could also experiment applying snow to a portrait. Why not? It’s all explained here. 31/ Space & Stars Photoshop Tutorial Granted, there are quite a few Photoshop brushes out there that provide you with starfields, but what if you’d like to start from scratch and create your own, personal space? That’s what this post is all about, right? So here we have an excellent Photoshop technique for you on creating a very realistic starfield with all those beautiful, colorful nebulas and stars. Ryan Foss, the tutorial author, finds a very good middle line between leaving it too empty and overdoing it. At the bottom of the tutorial, Ryan also shows possible alternatives and how to do it. See this excellent Photoshop stars technique in action for yourself right here. Phew. So much to skim though and not even half through! In case you would like to use this post for future reference and come back later, please bookmark this page. Also, click here to subscribe in an RSS reader, and never miss a future post. Photoshop Techniques: Textiles & Fibers Textiles, fibers and fabrics play a decent role in every graphic designer’s skillset. If you know how to create jeans from scratch, that can save your day. Here’s how to do that one and more textile textures (what a mouthful)! 32/ Silk Textures Look at this smooth and shiny silk texture. The color the author of this Photoshop techniqe uses for this fabric effect is pink, but you can do it any way you like. Learn Photoshop the professional way by taking a look at this tutorial right here! 33/ Satin Textures Well, whether you’d like to interpret this texture as silk or satin is up to you. It remains a solid and very good Photoshop technique for creating such a silky fabric from scratch. Slightly different to the above, therefore a must-see. Check this fabric folds tutorial out here. 34/ Synthetic Fibers Tutorial Those synthetic, hi-tech fabrics that clothing companies use for ski jackets or astronaut suits (just a wild guess here) – you can create this Photoshop effect with this tutorial over at Photoshop for fun. The end result is a flash, abstract wallpaper, but you can take what you want from this tutorial and don’t need to use it for that. Go there now. 35/ Jeans Texture Photoshop Tutorial Learn Photoshop in a perfect way: create your own Diesel! Or Levi’s! Or Armani Jeans! Whatever pleases your gusto, this Photoshop technique shows you exactly how to design denim jeans textures from scratch. Go there right now. 36/ Denim Jeans Texture 2 A second Photoshop technique for creating a jeans texture (denim texture) comes from 9tutorials and uses Photoshop’s halftone filter rather than the texturizer. In addition, Truong, the author, finishes the design off with a typical jeans seam. The stunning result can be seen above and followed in detail here. 37/ Camouflage Patterns This is a solid Photoshop technique to create your very own, custom camouflage patterns. You can color them the way you like, and make this typical army pattern as large or as small as you please. Check out this camouflage pattern Photoshop technique right over here. 38/ Seamless Pattern – Fibers & Fabrics Learn how to create a seamless pattern in Photoshop using this technique. This tutorial teaches you the basics (well – it applies the technique to an artwork, but you’re free to design your own), and you take it from there. Take a look at this Photoshop technique right here! Photoshop Techniques: Fluids Be it a pool or that delicious glass of Coca-Cola with water drops on it, you’ll be prepared for these challenges with the following Photoshop techniques on creating fluids from scratch. 39/ Water Drops Photoshop Tutorial Want to know how to make water drops in Photoshop – from scratch? Then this tutorial is for you. This method can be used for so many graphic designs; it’s an essential Photoshop technique in any way and we absolutely recommend it. Check it out for yourself right here. 40/ Create Water in Photoshop Learn how to create water in Photoshop from scratch with this essential Photoshop technqiue. It’s quick, and it’s easy. You can make anything you like out of it for your own artwork. Check this tutorial out right here. 41/ Water Swirls Swirls again, only this time water swirls! This Photoshop technique shows you how to design a beautiful water surface with subtle water swirls in it. You can use this technique to apply texture to a nice and sunny photograph of a house with pool, if you like. Just don’t put those swirls on the roof of the house. You can learn this Photoshop technique here. 42/ How to make Blood in Photoshop Learn how to make blood in Photoshop with this tutorial. It will be blood running down a wall – for the real stuff, stick with the following tutorial. This one is great too, though, as it is a very useful Photoshop technique. Check it out here. 43/ Photoshop Horror Effect, very fluid indeed Not quite along the lines of our earlier feature on Beeex.net about charming Photoshop horror effects, this Photoshop tutorial will show you how to make “blood and guts” in a very disgusting way. Not the tutorial is disgusting – it’s quite useful – but the Photoshop effect you achieve by following it. Go there here. Photoshop Techniques: man-made Textures Artificial / synthetic textures that the world comes up with are located here. The following Photoshop techniques show you how to create carbon fibers, asphalt, brick walls, diamond plates, glass textures and paper texture. Among others, of course. 44/ Photoshop Glass Effect A stunning, yet very convenient Photoshop technique on creating a realistic glass effect in Adobe Photoshop. In this case, the author (using Adobe Photoshop CS2, but it is the same for every Photoshop version) takes a photograph of a room and places a glass wall inside of it. He makes use of Photoshop masks along the way. This terriffic glass effect will come in handy from time to time, believe us! Check it out here. 45/ Wrinkled Paper from Scratch This is an excellent and in every way quite interesting Photoshop technique to create your own paper textures. No need for scanning paper or relying on third-party paper textures, you just go ahead and create your own realistic paper from scratch – following this great tutorial! And you know, it’s amazing how quick you are with this method. Go there right here. 46/ Torn Paper Texture Follow this great Photoshop tutorial on creating torn paper from scratch, and you got yourself a solid technique that you can use for your future artwork. This torn paper tutorial has been around a while, it’s by Janee, but it is a fundamental skill and therefore we’re featuring it for you! Go check it out right here. 47/ Burnt Paper Texture This is a Photoshop tutorial on creating and old, burnt paper texture from scratch. Again, you don’t absolutely need to follow this tutorial to the end result, but the Photoshop techniques you learn from it are solid. Check this piece out over here. 48/ Scanlines Texture Pattern – seamless Creating a television screen effect, also called TV lines, or scanlines, can add to a good graphic design. In this handy little Photoshop tutorial, you learn how to create Photoshop patterns (link to our previous tutorial on that) and finally apply the scanlines texture pattern to a photograph. It will be a seamless pattern, of course. Go to this tutorial right here. 49/ Asphalt Textures Learn a quick and easy way how to create asphalt textures in Photoshop. This tutorial shows you how to create a road texture with this Photoshop technique – very quickly, and with no hassle. It’s really quite easy, once you know how to do it! Check it out here. 50/ Brick Wall Tutorial This may seem rather oldschool to you, but even though we’re in the 21st century, stone brick walls still exist and brick wall textures still might be useful. This Photoshop technique shows you how to make use of that one filter in Photoshop that you never knew why the hell it even existed. Check this tutorial out right here. 51/ Diamonds Photoshop Tutorial Here we go bling-bling again, and you might raise that eyebrow but chill, brothers and sistas, coz dis PS Teq is fo y’all homies. You don’t need to plaster the streetz with diamondz in your designz, but you can use it for designing rockz. Not the rocks you find on mountains – we’re talkin grills & frills here people! You can use this method for any object, not just text. Now get lost. 52/ Diamond Metal Plate Texture We had hoped you’d be coming back. Here goes our next Photoshop technique, this time for creating one of those diamond metal plate textures – the ones you walk on in subways or so. This texture tutorial is by BioRust again, that’s a great design community and quite a few of the Photoshop techniques found on this page come from them. This tutorial features two different textures, one with oval nipples (sorry, but how do you call those little things anyway?), and one with diamonds. Check it out right here. 53/ Metal Holes Texture Pattern We’re not sure if this metal plate with holes has a dedicated name, but you might want to know how to design one at a point – so here comes this Photoshop technique. They refer to it as a floor pattern, but we still think it is a metal hole texture. Ha. Go to this tutorial right here. 54/ Carbon Fiber Tutorial Over at Hongkiat, we found this great tutorial on creating a seamless pattern of carbon fibers. The screenshot on their site is quite dark, that may be because our monitor is color adjusted for print (we brightened the image up a bit) – but it’s a very useful Photoshop technique and you can go see it here. 55/ Carbon Fiber Photoshop Tutorial 2 Yet another Photoshop technique for creating carbon fiber patterns (seamless and tileable), this style is a variation of the tutorial above (that doesn’t mean either one came first). It’s just another way of doing it, producing different results. Go see for yourself right here! Photoshop Techniques: Animal Textures Creating animals in Photoshop is a category for itself. This part of our 77 Photoshop Techniques for Creating Textures features methods for designing a couple of different animal fur textures, animal skins, and leather for both Photoshop pixel graphics and Illustrator vector art. 56/ Animal Fur Photoshop Tutorial This simple Photoshop tutorial shows you a technique of creating animal fur from scratch. You can end up adding dots or spots or other colors, but the method remains. Go there here. 57/ Tiger Fur Texture In this Photoshop tutorial, you learn a technique to create not only animal fur, but a yellow-and-black tiger fur texture that you can apply to objects – or not. The author applies it to text in this instance. Check this one out right here. 58/ Leopard Skin Photoshop Tutorial This Photoshop tutorial shows how quickly you can create realistic leopard skin. The very detailed result can be used for anything you like. Learn this Photoshop leopard skin technique over here. 59/ Cheetah Fur Texture This animal fur texture reminds us about cheetahs, but you could also call it another leopard texture. We’re no experts in the field of wild animals. If you are, please clarify You can go to this Photoshop tutorial right here. 60/ Leather Texture Create leather texture from scratch with this great tutorial. Very quickly, in four easy steps, you learn to master this useful Photoshop technique. You can go to this Photoshop leather tutorial right here. 61/ Leather Texture Illustrator Tutorial You can also take it up with Adobe Illustrator and create black, polished leather from scratch with vectors following this Illustrator tutorial. The tutorial itself on vectortuts is not only about making this leather texture, but goes into creating a police badge with metal and leather. You might want to jump directly to Step 8 of this rambling page. 62/ Vector Leather Texture 2 Another type of leather, and another Illustrator tutorial to show you how to create some vector leather texture from scratch. This tutorial also uses Illustrator textures for the effect, but another one and slightly differently. Take a look here. 63/ Cow Texture Pattern Tutorial Mooh goes the cow and so does the Porsche you can see in this screenshot. Learn this Photoshop cow texture pattern technique in this easy Photoshop tutorial right here – you don’t have to make the cow pattern black and white though, you could always make it a purple cow. 64/ Illustrator Hair Tutorial (What? In Animals?) Right. Humans are no animals. But following the premise that there are not many other human textures to fill a separate category with, and with the adage errare humanum est, here comes an Illustrator hair tutorial for you vector lovers. It’s quite good and explaines the Illustrator technique of creating shiny realistic hair in Adobe Illustrator. We have talked about Illustrator hair brushes and extracting hair in Photoshop and another Photoshop hair extraction technique before – and here comes an Illustrator tutorial on making realistic vector hair in Illustrator. Go there now. Photoshop Techniques: Classic Art Here, we feature three techniques for creating classic art textures – two for Adobe Photoshop, one for Illustrator. You can use these Photoshop techniques perfectly for applying this kind of art texture to your artwork. Of course, you know of all the Photoshop filters – we know you know – but did you know how to use them correctly? 65/ Oil Painting Photoshop Technique We don’t want to repeat ourselves, but just in case you think you already know the Photoshop oil painting filter, we’d like to ask if you are interested in learning how to enhance its effect with a few other Photoshop techniques. If so, please follow along. 66/ Watercolor Photoshop Technique Same goes for the built-in watercolor Photoshop filter – there is a simple trick how you can enhance the effect and come up with a really good watercolor painting. Take a look at this Photoshop technique right here. 67/ Pop Art Illustrator Technique Pop Art vectors in Illustrator? Easy – use halftones, right? (In fact, if you scroll down on the page, you’ll find quite a few retro halftone effects for both Photoshop and Illustrator.) Well, in this case: no. Use custom patterns instead. Learn how to create this kind of vector “Pop Art pattern” and apply it to an image you traced in Illustrator (link to previous post on Beeex.net). This Illustrator tutorial shows you how to do that in a Roy Lichtenstein style, is from vectortuts and you can find it here. Almost done with the list! Before we finish this off with the two remaining categories, Light/Color textures and Retro textures: Have you subscribed to our feed yet? Ok! Photoshop Techniques: Textures with Light and Color The following Photoshop techniques are excellent examples of working with color. The first two do that explicitly and you’ll end up with some very colorful textures of your own, that you can use to enhance a certain type of your artwork. The third Photoshop technique is different, also very beautiful, and maybe you can find a place to use it with. 68/ Abstract Color Photoshop Tutorial A simple and fast, yet excellent Photoshop tutorial on creating colored lines. Giacomo Coppola from Italy shows you how to create this stunning effect. These color lines are perfect if you want to complete a design that can live with this kind of texture. Go see this nice goodie right here. 69/ Eclipse/Light Curtain Photoshop Effect Making use of this Photoshop effect can create stunning light effects that you can use as subtle textures, or as prominent elements. Fabio Sasso from Abduzeedo shows you how to do it – a very cool tutorial indeed. You can choose to take this Photoshop technique from start until step 8 (in which case you end up with what we captured in this screenshot), or you can follow along with the tutorial and apply one of the free textures from our previous post to the effect. Go check this nice tutorial out here. 70/ Dust & Spray Effect This beautiful Photoshop effect by David Leggett uses a very cool technique and places an abstract element in an actually unrelated environment. Take a look at this dust right here. Photoshop Techniques: Retro Textures After the popularity of the retro backgrounds in our previous post, this category contains retro Photoshop technqiues such as halftones, more swirls and general “aging effects” that can be used to create an old-style photograph. Hence the title “retro”. 71/ Photoshop Halftone Effect Here is a great (and long) tutorial on transforming an image of a girl with a ghettoblaster into an image of a girl with a ghettoblaster and halftones. And some 3D text on top. And some floating X’s on top, which are also 3D. But but, we don’t need all that, we just want the excellent part where the author explains how to create halftone effects with this Photoshop technique. Go there now. 72/ Illustrator Halftone Background Tutorial Halftones are nice. Not always so easy to master (if you don’t know how to do it) – but nice. Learn how to create a halftone background in Adobe Illustrator. You’ll be working with vectors, naturally. This is the counterpart of the above tutorial for the vector art version of Adobe Creative Suite. You can learn this Illustrator technique right here. 73/ Vector Halftones Video Tutorial This Illustrator video tutorial shows you how to create vector halftones that are slightly different from the above technique. You can view this vector tutorial right here. 74/ Retro Halftone Comic Style This Photoshop technique takes an original photograph and uses effects to create a retro halftone effect that pretty much resembles a very popular comic style. It’s very handy to know how to use this effect, so go to this tutorial here. 75/ Retro Swirls Swirls again! This time, they look like ice cream backgrounds and you can apply this Photoshop technique perfectly to create a retro texture style. It’s really about the technique, not so much about the choice of colors used in this tutorial… Think very dark, shady background with dark green retro swirls set to Multiply or Overlay as a texture. It’s really what you make of it. Check this tutorial out here. 76/ Photoshop Grain & Dust Retro Effects Here is a great tutorial on applying Photoshop grain effects to an artwork. The scratches you see are of course created from scratch (cheap pun – sorry) following this Photoshop technique. Therefore, this tutorial belongs in the retro category and most certainly in this list. Go there now. 77/ Photoshop Grain Technique 2 A very quick and easy Photoshop technique on applying grain to your photographs or other kind of artwork. Go see it here. SPECIAL BONUS/ MySpace Glitter Backgrounds Oh no. Not again. But you know, in fact, actually – - well, see if you can find any use for glitter backgrounds for yourself. You don’t even have to have a Myspace page. In fact, chances are high that if you are into graphic design a bit, you really don’t have one. If you are a designer and still on Myspace, then we’re sure that your profile page isn’t like all the others. See how you can make glitter backgrounds right here. Here we go! We gave our best to make this list complete and to offer you a good and hopefully useful collection of 77 Essential Photoshop Techniques for creating photo-realistic Textures. If you know a killer resource we forgot, please add it in the comments. We always appreciate your input and feedback! You’re also free to stumble or digg this post, of course And don’t forget to subscribe to our feed if you don’t want to miss our future posts! Thanks for stopping by! See you again soon, ~Beeex Happy Team

When it comes to website backgrounds, background tiles or tile patterns, you may have a hard time finding high resolution textures on the web. Sure, you could go to one of the stock photography sites and search for paid website graphics, but how do you know if you have found the best web page backgrounds available, and you haven’t missed any free textures out there? Doing a search on Google won’t always bring the best results, and most of what you’ll find are backgrounds that cost money. That’s why we made this post. The ultimate collection of background patterns, background tiles and free textures for your website. All high quality. All for graphic designers. You can download them for free and use them in Photoshop to fit your web pages. Definition of Texture Let’s first take a look at what the difference is between patterns and textures. Basically, these are two different expressions in design, describing different elements, and they are not the same. And as this post is about website backgrounds, we should make the difference clear before we start. Background Patterns Background patterns are tile patterns with which you can create a seamless pattern. This means that the borders of this kind of graphics fit into each other seamlessly, without revealing to the eye where one tile ends and where another one starts. We covered techniques on creating patterns in Photoshop and how extend that knowledge and play around with Photoshop patterns in the past. Adobe Photoshop comes with a pattern function that is intended for seamless tile patterns, and we recommend you read these website background tutorials first. It is always better to know how you can create your own graphics. Background Textures Background textures, on the other hand, can be a seamless pattern, but they don’t have to. Don’t be confused – the secret lies in the definition of texture in graphic design. Texture is an element of design and is best described as “the feel of an object”. Interesting reads on the elements of design can be found here: Using Texture: Real World Examples at Creative Curio Textures and Patterns Design Showcase at Smashing Magazine The secret Rules of Composition in Design at Nubloo’s Graphic Design Blog Design Notes: Texture by James T. Saw It is important not to confuse the element of design (texture) with web backgrounds (textures). We can put it this way: Background textures make use of texture. Background textures can be patterns. Background patterns can be seamless. Whoa. Confused already? Don’t be. Let’s just get to the most extensive list of textures you’ve ever seen on the internet. Please check out the license of any background image you wish to use with your graphic designs. They are all free, and most of them are also free for commercial use, but some require a backlink or another sort of reference. The license is usually noted on the download pages. Textures We are making a start with high resolution textures that are not seamless. 1/ Wood Textures This is a great set of free textures that were scanned from real wood plates. 720 dpi. 100 different wood textures with an average filesize of 6 MB. Download these high resolution textures right here. 2/ Paper Textures This is a collection of 30 free paper backgrounds; all are high resolution textures. Some of these are perfect for a grunge style background; you can even make your own Photoshop brushes with them. Go to the download page for these paper textures on Creative Closeup right here. 3/ Grunge Paper Textures Yet another freebie over at BittBox, this time it’s 4 old, crunchy, grunge paper textures in high resolution. The download is 18 MB large. Go and get them. 4/ Wall Textures Here comes a collection of 24 free high-res textures – stone / wall / concrete, whatever you’d like to call them. They come from BittBox for free download – go there from here. 5/ Metal Textures If you’re looking for metallic textures for your graphic designs, have a look here. DeviantArt is a good place to go anyway; this is their metal textures gallery. Check it out. 6/ Rust Textures Also on DevianArt, there is a collection of high resolution rust textures for use in your designs. Go there right here. 7/ Hair Textures If you want to apply hair to your web page background, here you go: this is a collection of hair textures on DeviantArt. Go there now. 8/ Old Book Textures BittBox did us all the favor of scanning an old book and offering the resulting hi-res images for free download on his site. Great for grunge style designs – go check it out here. 9/ Grunge Textures Urban Dirty features “free texture stock photography for your artwork, designs and desktops”. Right now, they feature 404 (four hundred and four) grunge, dirty, destroyed, etc. textures. the collection includes wall textures, plastic textures, metal textures, concrete textures, and more – all in the “grunge” category. Most photos are at 180 dpi and 3027 x 2304 pixels large. Wow. Check them out here. 10/ Grunge Textures 2 Texture King is another website for free stock textures. They cover “grunge, dirt, plaster, concrete, rust and more”. The free downloads come as ZIP files and are all high resolution. Go to Texture King here. 11/ Grunge Textures 3 This website has a lot of “free high resolution textures for digital art, 3D rendering, web design and print projects”. Categories include aircraft aluminium, drains, vents and grates, graffiti and vandalism textures, metal, mud and clay, spills and splatter, trash and garbage, and more. You can visit Grungetextures right here. Various Texture Galleries The following websites are galleries that have textures and web backgrounds within a variety of categories. 12/ CG Textures This site has a large collection of high resolution textures that also work well as a desktop wallpaper. Categories include brick textures, concrete textures, textiles, ground, grunge textures, metal textures, nature, paper textures, plastic textures, rust, scrap, signs, splatter, water textures, wood textures, floral backgrounds, and more. Go to CG Textures here. 13/ Free Foto The site Free Foto requires that you agree to mention them with a backlink before you can use one of their free textures for your website. They also ask for an email address, but that shouldn’t be a problem… They do have a few nice free backgrounds in a decent resolution. Go check them out here. 14/ Ben Cloward’s Textures The character animator Ben Cloward gives us a beautiful collection of high resolution textures for free use. They include brick and cement textures, cloud textures, snow, stone and stucco textures, and even skin textures. Check them out. 15/ Dr. Web Textures Dr. Web Magazine lists quite a few hi-res background textures, including metallic textures, wall and wood textures, sand, stone and plastic backgrounds. Go visit the site here. 16/ luGher Texture A gallery for nature related textures – all in good quality, including categories such as wood, soil textures and earth, pavements, ancient brick walls, broken walls, marble, and more. Check them out right here. 17/ Texturez Another site with a nice little collection of free texture backgrounds for your website or desktop. Check them out here. 18/ Amazing Textures Amazing Textures is a collection of free textures, including walls, stone and brick, wood and metal, doors, buildings and tiles (as in bathroom and kitchen), and more. They also have a section of tiled textures. You have access to the free textures in medium quality but if you want to download the high-res textures, you have to register (also free). Check out Amazing Textures right here. 19/ Texture Warehouse A great stock gallery site for free background textures that you can use in your designs. A large variety can be found here – asphalt, brick, marble, paint and glass textures, plastic textures, rubber textures and much more. You gotta check them out – right here. 20/ 3D Place Yet another site for free textures, 3D Place features a gallery ranging from hair, fur and leather textures over fiber textures to all kinds of paper textures (yellow pad, cream paper, recycled paper, moon paper, and paper towels). Oh well, what are we saying, just go check it out! 21/ 2Textured This website holds a whole bunch of user generated, free textures in a lot of categories, among them man-made (like guns), human (anatomy), food and panorama. Check 2Textured out here. 22/ Texture Love Texture love has lots of free textures for you, all in high resolution. You can vote on the textures and push them into or out of a “most popular” list. Go to this gallery right here. Tile Patterns If you’re looking for a seamless background, you might find what you are looking for in this category. The following websites are full of free backgrounds for your website. Here are the seamless patterns and tile patterns. 23/ Retro Backgrounds This site has an abundance of retro backgrounds for your website. Seamless, of course. They are sorted by style and color and we’re sure that you will love them all. Check Citrus Moon Patterns out right over here. 24/ Retro Background Patterns 2 And of course, when it comes to retro background patterns, this site can’t be left out. Squidfingers is the portfolio of Travis Beckham, has been featured before on Beeex.net (158 Free Tiled Retro Background Patterns), features just that and is a must for seamless patterns. Go to this great website right here. 25/ Retro Backgrounds 3 Evan Eckard has put up a wonderful little site full of free retro backgrounds of all kinds and colors. From dark backgrounds over floral patterns to vintage style textures, you’re served well and even are able to leave a comment on the patterns. Check this gem out now. 26/ Floor / Brick Textures Rafael Ibarrondo of Tirad.com brings us a collection of historic floor, brick, and wall textures, that can be used to create a seamless pattern. The photos are original terracotta floors from the Marienburg Castle in Germany (~ 11th century). Very nice – download these free patterns from this page. 27/ Stone Patterns StockTextures seems to be halfway under construction, yet they already have some nice seamless patterns of photo-realistic walls, stones, rock surfaces et cetera. They ask for registration prior to a download, but the tile patterns are free. You can visit them here. 28/ Vintage Patterns Baroque patterns. Floral backgrounds. Vintage patterns. Call them what you like, our friends over at Snap2Objects deliver 6 of these for free download. These backgrounds also have been featured on Beeex.net before, and they can’t be left out in this collection. You can find these patterns here. 29/ Baroque Patterns and Floral Backgrounds The Inspiration Gallery features a whole lot of baroque patterns from the beautiful renaissance and rococo era. The damask wallpaper patterns are indeed a pleasure to the eye and usually come in creamy, sand color tones of lighter tints or darker shades. Another large category contains floral backgrounds, as well as ivy and leaves. Marble, moiré, mottled and country charm are some of the other categories. Go take a look. Pattern Generators Looking for a seamless pattern for your website, but don’t wanna fire up Illustrator or Photoshop? Better so, why get dirty when you can easily get free backgrounds using these pattern generators. 30/ Stripe Generator 2.0 This is a genuine Web 2.0 Ajax Stripe Generator which lets you create seamless patterns on the fly. You can choose the orientation/angle of the stripes, their width, colors and/or gradients. A full-screen preview is also available, so that you can check how your web page background will look before you download the pattern. Go to the Stripe Generator right here. 31/ Background Generator This is a great little toy: Just like you’d create an icon, pixel by pixel, you simply design your pattern and see it grow seamless on the rest of the screen. We featured the tiled background generator on Beeex.net before – you can go use it right here. 32/ Tile Machine Just like the above, this is a tile generator which you can use to create free seamless textures. It works similar to the background generator. Check it out here. 33/ Pattern Cooler Now this is a wonderful innovation. From the countless available patterns on this site – mainly retro and vintage style, all seamless tiles – you select one and in the next step, you are able to change every color of the design. So from a blue background with light blue circles and a yellow dot, you can go to a dark green background with pink circles and a yellow dot. It’s all up to you. After that, you get to set the size of the whole thing and what you get is a perfectly seamless background pattern of your own. Go check this cool site out right now. 34/ Texture Generator Yet another background generator, only this time with the option to apply texture to the seamless tiles. You select your favorite retro design of the pattern, define a color, its size, and a texture; what you get is your own seamless web background. Great stuff, check it out here. Various Pattern Galleries The following websites are galleries that have seamless tile patterns within a variety of categories. Usually, the tiles are smaller and not high resolution. 35/ Backgrounds Archive You will find tileable web page backgrounds en masse on this site, and also free desktop wallpapers. Website background categories include bricks, edibles, fabric, grass backgrounds, leaves, marble backgrounds, metallic textures, paper textures, rocks, sky patterns, space, stones, stucco, swirls, water textures, and wood; the free desktop wallpapers have categories such as animals, art backgrounds, aviation and automobiles, cartoon backgrounds, celebrities, cities and countries, food and drinks, and more. Check the Backgrounds Archive out right here. 36/ Gallerie 1 Most of these background patterns can be used as a seamless pattern, yet some are high resolution textures which appear not to be tileable. Some good ones are features here, if you can cope with the German category titles – which shouldn’t be too hard, just click on a category and take a look 37/ Absolute Cross This website has 10 “texture packs” which very much resemble a typical 1990s web page style – a bit retro, yet possibly still useful. Take a look right here (you need to have JavaScript enabled or else you’ll be getting 404s). 38/ Blender Texture CD At first glance, this website also reminds us about retro background patterns, yet there are some hidden gems among their free textures. The site holds a collection of typical Photoshop patterns that are mostly tileable – well, actually they are not meant for Photoshop, but for Blender, the (very cool) free open source 3D creation suite (much like 3D Studio Max or any other 3D graphics program). But what’s the difference? JPEGs they are. Go ahead and check them out on this page. 39/ 2D Valley This website has a collection of background tiles that can be used for Photoshop patterns as well. The range is from wood and stone over fabric and metal textures to wallpaper textures and tiles. Go to this site right here. 40/ The Limelite This site has three pages packed with seamless background tiles. The imagery is mostly object oriented, which means that you will find mostly tiling objects here; but also walls, for instance. They even have one or two animated web backgrounds, which doesn’t mean that you should use them. Check this site out here. 41/ Repeat XY Repeat XY is a great site for seamless backgrounds with a “search by color” funciton. They have a lot to offer and if you’re looking for great, free web page backgrounds, you should definitely check this site out. 42/ PlanIt 3D Both tile patterns and texture backgrounds can be found here, in a whole bunch of categories. Watch the license, they want you to give credit to them if you use one of their free textures on your website. Go to this site here. 43/ Pattern4u by Kollermedia Jürgen Koller runs this great website and blog and features user-generated patterns and web page backgrounds. A variety of categories include vintage patterns, grass textures, paper wall textures, wood textures, and much more. Check out this site right here. Backgrounds What doesn’t fit in the textures category, and doesn’t fit in the pattern category, must still have a place. Here is a list of free backgrounds that can’t be called either of the above, but still deserve to be featured. 44/ Spiral Backgrounds A gallery of spiral background wallpapers. Beautiful and inspiring – if not for your website, maybe as your desktop wallpaper? Go to this gallery here. 45/ Smashing Texture Gallery Smashing Magazine held a texture contest earlier this year and the outcome was a gallery full of unique backgrounds and textures, most of them high resolution. The categories are: wood/bark, stone/walls/brick, metal/rust/industrial, nature/flowers/plants, water/ice/drops/liquids, sand/earth, fabric, paper, glass, fire/ashes, food, plastic, and misc. Check these free textures out here. 46/ Cool Backgrounds Paulo from the website Abuzeedo compiled a list of 36 cool backgrounds for your website. Both colorful and dark, they can be downloaded for free right here. WHAT?/ Rainbow Backgrounds Yes, we know. Terrible. But MySpace users have the right to exist, too. Sometimes. So here come some cool MySpace backgrounds that have rainbow colors in them. Colorful as hell, and you can go to the gallery here. Make no mistake – use them with Comic Sans. And no, we do not feature animated web backgrounds. Here we go, this was the Beeex.net Ultimate Collection of Background Patterns, Tiles & Textures for Websites – we tried to create a complete list and find only the best high-quality textures for you. Do you know of any site we forgot? Add your favorite free pattern or texture site in the comments, if you like! Yours truly, ~ Beeex Happy Team

A little while back, we posted a list of 8 and a half excellent WordPress Plugins you probably didn’t know about. It was a reaction to our community voting for more Wordpress related stuff, such as themes and plugins and tutorials and goodies. Well, the post was very popular and ever since, we have been collecting even more interesting and, above all, new and rather unknown WordPress plugins for your blog. So here comes a list of 10 excellent and promising plugins for the popular blogging platform WordPress. Some you will not know yet, because they are brand new. They all run on WordPress 2.5 and above and are updated frequently by their authors. Because they are so new, some still have a few minor bugs that are currently still being fixed, but they do work nicely and you can be sure that the plugin authors are working hard on improving their work. So right here, we’d like to thank all of you who are doing such a great job at this. These are all free plugins, and with this post, we also want to show you that there are some great talents out there. If you download and use the plugins they give us for free, then please give some love back by commenting on their sites, donating to those who accept donations, or leaving a comment on this post saying a quick thank you. So here goes: 10 excellent & promising WordPress Plugins for you! There’s a link to the author/plugin page as well as a link to the download page for each free plugin. We didn’t include direct download links because this way, you can always get the newest version of the plugin from the source. So let’s get started. 1. MailPress The MailPress Plugin page is here, or download from here directly. MailPress is a great newsletter plugin that enables your WordPress blog to send out emails to your subscribers. It comes with fully customizable newsletter templates for posts and categories. The plugin also includes a simple, one-button sign-up form that you can place in your widgetized sidebar. From the admin area in WordPress, you can send newsletters out to your subscribers using the newsletter template – either for every new post you publish, or in an interval (every day, week, and month). There is a PHP file that you can use to create newsletter templates that match your blog design. This plugin requires a bit of coding, especially for the PHP template, but you can find a lot of information at the plugin page and even if you’re not sure how to handle PHP, you can still use this nice WordPress plugin. 2. Post Tabs You can find the Post Tabs WordPress Plugin page here, and the download link at WordPress. This one is a wonderful and cool tab maker and as you can see, it creates tabs for the content you like. Easy. Stylable. Customizable. Great! After installed and activated on your WordPress blog, you can use tags when you write a post to place your content in tabs. As easy as [ tab:Tab Name ], and [ tab:END ] (without the whitespaces). The first one always shows first, unless you enable the option to store the open tab in a cookie, so that when a blog reader returns, he will find the tab active that he had open the last time. There is also an option “permalink for tabs”. If you activate it (we left it disabled), the page will reload when you click on a tab, revealing the permalink of the tab in your browser’s address bar. The plugin options in the WordPress backend / admin offer a bit of flexibility. What you can do is change the tab border color and background color for active/hover classes. What a few of you might miss is an option to style the content of the tab itself (not just the title). For instance, we added a light grey border to the content of this tab unit (it’s the border running around this very text). How? The class for the tabs is postTabs_divs, and you can use it to style the tabs with CSS. Simply add this line to your theme’s style.css, and you get what we got right here: .postTabs_divs { border:1px solid #dcdcdc; margin-top:-12px; } The border explains itself, and the negative top margin was added so that the content div would match the position of the tab bar. 3. First Timer The First Timer Plugin page contains the download link as well. The First Timer WordPress Plugin checks to see if a visitor is new to your blog. If so, it displays a custom message at a position of your choice, e.g. above the WordPress loop (that is, above all posts). What you display to your first-time visitors is up to you – usually, you’ll go for an encouragement to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. Caution though, as this plugin doesn’t work with either WP Cache or WP Super Cache. 4. Similar Posts The Similar Posts plugin page has a link to the download of this plugin. You also need to install the Post-Plugin Library for it to run properly. On the search for a better “related posts” plugin after the last one we featured (in this previous post about WordPress plugins), we found this one. It is in action right now below every post on Beeex.net. What it does is simply pull related posts and display them in the manner you specify, either with an excerpt, with a URL, or quite a few more options. You can even specify how much it should weigh the post title vs. the post content when it determines which posts are related. 5. Snazzy Archives Go to the Snazzy Archives plugin page here, it includes the download link. Here’s a nice WordPress plugin to spice (snazz) up your blog archives. Using a page template that you can customize if you wish, you can create an archive that looks just like a calendar – the months are ordered horizontically, with the days as blocks under them. You can choose to include post images (preferrably by using WordPress custom fields), an excerpt of the post, and so on. You can also customize the CSS file to match the archive page to your blog’s appearance. Snazzy Archives comes with optional date collapse functions, so that by clicking on a month, for instance, it collapses all day slots for that month and shows only the date. 6. Code Autoescape The Code Autoescape Plugin is here, where you can find the download link as well. This fine little plugin auto-escapes code that you insert in HTML tags. If you need to display code in your blog posts, this one is for you. And yes, there are a lot of code plugins out there (the author lists a few of them himself for you to compare), but this is one we find most functional, most easy, and least buggy. Every time you want to display a code snippet (which WordPress would normally convert), thus you’re using the tag, this plugin will autoescape (= tell WordPress not to convert) the contents of that tag. Let’s test it right here – the plugin is running on this blog as well: <html> <title>This actually works with HTML, XHTML, and also PHP</title> <body> <a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"> Visit <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>, it's hot ;) </a> </body> </html> It works for any kind of text. If it didn’t, you would be seeing the result of the PHP call (URL and blog name), and not the call itself. Great little plugin 7. WP Comment Remix WP Comment Remix can be found here, or go directly to the download page on Wordpress.org. WP Comment Remix is a cool plugin for blogs that receive a large amount of comments. We took a shot at it and installed it anyhow What it does is add two anchor links to the comments on the front end of your WordPress blog: “Reply” and “Quote”. The first button simply takes the reader down to the comment input form, and pastes a link to the comment they want to reply to in the comment box that says “@ Commentauthor name”. The “Quote” button copies the text of the comment you want to quote into the comment box and wraps it in blockquotes. On the admin side of WordPress, this plugin adds the same buttons to the comments section and lets you reply to a comment in an AJAX popup window, all from your backend. That speeds up the process of replying to comments immensely. You can test this comment right here on our blog (hint hint)! Update: Unfortunately, we had to deactivate this plugin again, as it doesn’t eat WordPress 2.6 and causes a little error. It is still a great plugin and works fine with WP 2.5x, so if you haven’t updated to the newest version yet, you can still use it. We’ll keep you updated as soon as it has been updated for WP 2.6 8. Role Scoper Go to the Role Scoper plugin here, the download link is on the page. Role Scoper is a plugin that enables and enhances the already built-in capability of WordPress to deal with “roles”. If you’re building a CMS with WordPress, for a client maybe, who wishes to give access to the backend to his employees, this plugin is for you. With Role Scoper, you are able to modify the roles WordPress carries until you drop. Roles are something like “Subscriber”, “Editor”, “Author”, “Administrator” etc. This WordPress plugin makes it easy to broaden or narrow the rights every role has, once you have worked yourself through the vast amount of options the plugin delivers. It’s not something for the casual personal blog with one author, but for high-end CMS solutions based on WordPress, this plugin is the best we’ve seen around in a while. 9. Brian’s Threaded Comments Optimized for SEO Go to the plugin page, which contains a description and the download link. This is a modified version of Brian’s Threaded Comments (original plugin here). It nests comments in threads. A link to “reply” is added to each comment, which places your reply below the comment you are replying to, and not below everyone else’s. It is debateable if you find this useful – it can be, for certain types of blogs. Sometimes, though, you will want a linear thread where the comments are ordered solely by the time they were posted, which is the original WordPress functionality. Take a look if you like, though. Justin from SEO Zombie modified the WordPress plugin and optimized it for Search Engine Optimization by dissecting it and placing the JavaScript and CSS the plugin uses in separate files. This keeps your WordPress template clean and speeds up the page load time – better SEO for your website. 10. WP Watermark WP Watermark can be found here, the download link is on this page. This plugin automatically watermarks all your pictures on your WordPress blog with either your logo (it can be a transparent PNG file), or with a text you choose. You can specify the position, size and font of the custom text, or of the logo image. This is a good way to protect your images against theft and copyright infrigement (well.. it’s arguable). So if you regularly post your own images, photographs, or artwork on your blog, consider this. The plugin can even watermark your thumbnails, so its advantage is very clear. There is no need to run your image folder through a Photoshop action to give every image a watermark anymore. Use WP Watermark instead. Upon installation, you will need to add a single line to a WordPress core file. Other than that little hurdle, it works like a charm. There are detailed instructions on the plugin page, simply follow the link above! Also, if you upgrade WordPress, you will need to repeat this step in case the old file has been replaced by the new version. 10 Useful and Promising WordPress Plugins …for you! We hope you like them and do find them useful. Some of these plugins are from over at the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog, run by Weblog Tools Collection. We’d like to thank Mark, Jeff, Ronald and Keith for their great blog which we encourage you to visit, and for having this great idea for a plugin competition. If you get a chance, hop over and vote for your favorite plugin. Also, thank you to all the authors of these WordPress Plugins. Keep up the great work! That’s it, folks! We hope you enjoy our list of 10 Excellent & Promising WordPress Plugins, some Brand-New, and come back soon for more (Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed)! ~ Your Beeex Happy Team

Here’s a great free vector art pack by our friends the Vibr8 Bros. These vectors come as a genuine Illustrator .AI file for unlimited scalability, and do take a look: these very realistic embroidery badges are full, 100% vector graphics – there are no pixel/raster patterns involved! The vector pack contains eight embroidery badges, all in different colors. What you get is vectors in green, red, brown, blue, and white, with various pre-made text graphics inside of them. And as if that wasn’t enought already, the Vibr8 Bros. also included four blank vector graphics with no text – for you to write your own blurb inside of it. How’s that? Take a look at what is included in this download. The free vector art file looks like this: ..and it is an AI file for use in Adobe Illustrator CS3. There also is a secondary download, also free, which contains the vector graphics as PNG files (12 of them) – at a decent size, so that you can open them in Photoshop or another graphic design program, if you prefer not working with vector graphics. You can download this free vector art pack right here. Enjoy!

Hi folks, today we have a very nice and sexy goodie for you: the Ultimate Collection of Free Vector Girls to download directly to your desktop! The following vector art graphics are for free download – all of them, we made sure of that. If you ever wanted to design a flyer, a poster or a website using a sexy girl or a female silhouette in your artwork, then you know that it can be tough finding someting good, useable and free on the internet. Now we’re not talking photography, but vector art – that means that the designer either traced the girl from an existing image, or that he created her from scratch. Now you could always trace a photograph on your own. We covered a technique to do that in this post, How to Trace a Photo in Illustrator. If you don’t want to do that by yourself, this post is for you. Take a look at what we’ve got for you. This post contains no nudity, only quality vector art. These files come with a Creative Commons license or a GPL license and are free to use for personal work. The download link for each free vector pack is included with each feature. Enjoy! Lifestyle Girls Vector Pack 1 This is a fantastic, 4-part set of free vectors – stylish, fashionable, sexy girls (and guys, too) for free download. This part contains 15 high-quality vector graphics. Download Part 1 here. Lifestyle Girls Vector Pack 2 Part two of this set, it contains 15 vector graphics. Download this part right here. Lifestyle Girls Vector Pack 3 You guessed it, this is the third part of the lifestyle girls free vectors: download it here. Lifestyle Girls Vector Pack 4 And, well yeah, the fourth part of this great series. This part contains 19 vectors. Download this free vector pack here. Dancing Girls This is a simple set of girls dancing on a red background. Download this free vector right here. Vector Ballet Dancers These vector silhouettes of ballet dancers comes from the same artist who designed the vampire girl below. It’s a PDF, you might want to right-click on this link to save it. Dancing Girls 2 This is a free vector pack of dancing girls designed in great detail. Download this file from here. Swooshy Vector Art Girls Here is a great set of vectors picturing sexy girls with sexy swooshes. The free package contains 8 EPS files. The file is hosted on RapidShahe, here is the link to download this free vector pack. Vector Girl with Swirls Here is a nice vector graphic of a swirly girl – white on an orange background. Download this file directly from here. Swirly Curl Gurl Girl, not gurl, but still. This nice vector art is coming from our friend CreateSk8 and you can download this swirl curl girl directly from here. More Vector Swirls & a Girl Yet another girl with swirl hair for you, again from the author of the art above. You can download this file from here directly. Girl on Bed, Legs against the Wall This is a vector art of a girl laying on a bed, with her legs up against the wall. You can download this vector graphic here. Beauty Girl Four girls that you know from uptown. They only let you take them out if you pick them up in a Mercedes, and during dinner they have to go check their make-up every 20 minutes. Brr. Download this file right here. Vector Make-Up Girl This is a woman applying make-up. The color scheme is watercolor, soft, pink and cyan. You can place this vector art on your desktop from right here. Shopping Girls Vector Pack This is a very nice set of girls doing something we guys love to do, too. Really. Download this free vector pack from here. Style Girls Vector Packs 1&2 Take a look at this goodie. What we have are two fully packed free vector packs – oh yes. Stylish style girls they are, and we found them on the later-to-be-mentioned design blog of Ateneu. Download vector Pack 1 and Pack 2. Fantasy Girl This is a wonderful vector art work of a fantasy figure. She even has pointy ears. You can download this file from here – it’s a filesharing service and you have to fill in a Capcha field. Vampire Girl This is an artwork by Lawrence Bezuska, who is a big fan of Frazetta. Now we don’t know who that is – apparently a sexy vampire of some sort – so we didn’t want to keep this from you Here is the link to the PDF, it’s a vector graphic so you can dissect it in Illustrator. Right-click and save-as on your desktop. Girls with Guns This free vector pack contains three girls in bikinis wearing automatic weapons. Ratatatata-ta. Download from this page. Vector Business Women This is a collection of three silhouettes of business women. Three vector silhouettes of men in business are also included. These free vectors come from Snap2Objects and you can download the file directly from here. Asian Vector Girls These free vectors are about asian girls. They come in a watercolor style. The pack comes in two files, you can find the download links here. Abstract Vector Art A wonderful set of free vectors. Download this file right here. Female Heads This is a collection of female heads, both in vector format (EPS) and raster graphic (PSD) for Photoshop. You can download it via RapidShare here. Dreamgirl with Snake This is a beautiful vector artwork of a pretty girl with… well… we voted here and we think it is a snake. What do you say? Check it out: download here. Sinning Vector Girl This is another artwork of the designer behind the design blog Ateneu Popular, but we don’t speak the language he writes in… Nevertheless, he has some very good stuff, like this free vector art for you to download here. Vector Silhouettes This free vector pack contains a set of 30+ monochrome countours, or silhouettes, of girls. You can find the download page here. Cute Vector Girls This is a set of cute and loveable girls in a hand-drawn style. Download these free vectors from here. Vector Disco Girl A sexy girl taking a sip out of her vodka-something. Download her here. And finally… Sexy Hottie (yes, it’s a vector) Now here’s a beautiful, hot girl for you in vector format. Get inspired by this artwork from Ateneu. You can download it right here! Ok there you have them, the ultimate collection of free vector art girls. Fresh on your desktop. Do you like them? Enjoy! Yours truly, ~Beeex Happy Team

Here’s a nice and easy Illustrator tutorial on designing those sexy, glossy lips in your favorite vector design software – from scratch. This tutorial doesn’t use photo tracing techniques, but shows you how to create this vector illustration starting with a white page. Illustrator is perfect for that. In the tutorial, you start off by creating two simple oval shapes. As you go on, you’ll learn how to use Adobe Illustrator’s Pathfinder Tool, how to work with Path Anchor, and how to use the Gradient Mesh Tool to come to the above result. Take a look at a few of the steps in this free vector tutorial: …and you can go to this tutorial right here!

We have an amazing Photoshop tutorial for you today. Take a look at this picture: You think it’s a photograph, right? Well, it’s not! The above artwork has been created from scratch, using Adobe Photoshop only. The designer and author of this great tutorial, Daniel “Wade” Hammonds, started with a white canvas and describes every step in the process of creating this beautiful piece of design. The tutorial spreads on seven pages and illustrates the necessary steps to create such an artwork quite thoroughly. To create the image, Daniel mostly used the Photoshop Brush in Airbrush mode, the Smudge tool, and the Dodge and Burn tools. We rated this tutorial for experienced Photoshop users, because you do need some practice and experience (and a calm and steady hand) in dealing with these tools. If you want to see what’s possible with Adobe Photoshop and you want to learn professional techniques, this tutorial is a must-read for you. You can go to this Photoshop tutorial here. Enjoy!