Minty Ferret is taking the weekend to move, you might see a couple of weird things but everything should be running smooth shortly. Keep an eye out!
Update: Site is back up! Everything should be running smoothly, but please comment if you notice any broken links and I’ll work on getting them fixed. Thanks!
Welcome to Part Two of the ‘How to Make Money with Photoshop‘ series (you can check out Part One here!). This post is completely on time and not an entire year late, I assure you.
Last time I taught you how to use Photoshop (coupled with Illustration and Photography skills) to sell stock images on major websites. I’m happy to hear that some of you who followed my advice were able to make a buck or two! One of my referrals to Dreamstime has made over $500 selling stock! Congratulations!
This time I’ll show you how to make money with your graphic skills by participating in Graphic Design Competitions. This has always been a rather touchy and controversial area – basically designers compete with one another creating graphics and/or logos for a single client. At the end of the contest, the client will choose just one entry to award a prize to, while the rest of the designers walk away with nothing. This is known as ‘Spec’ work (or ‘Speculation’) and tends to be frowned upon by the graphic design community. Etiquette can also take a beating in these types of situations – you may find that elements of your design are being copied by other individuals, so make sure you know how to protect your intellectual property.
I just happened across this Stumpy Pencil Photoshop Brush the other day. It uses a brush already packaged with Photoshop and applies different Brush Presets to help emulate the look and feel of a blunt pencil. The brush creator is a much better illustrator than I am, make sure to check out the sketches he was able to create using the brush!
If you’re having trouble installing the brush into photoshop, try out the following. The ‘brush’ is not actually a brush, but rather a set of Tool Presets (.tpl), which may cause some confusion when installing.
First, locate your Presets-Tools folder. The path should be similar to the image below. Upload the file to this folder.
Head over to Photoshop and open the Tools window.
And finally Load up the file, grab your brush, and start sketching!
With the Tales of Beedle the Bard released a few short days ago, Potter-mania is once again on the rise!
David Occhino has created this brilliant Potter-esque font, aptly named Hocus Pocus, for use in all your magical projects.
Although not free (the font comes priced at a very reasonable $20), Hocus Pocus is perfect for use in professional projects – as far as I know, it is the only Harry Potter font that contains a full character set (meaning punctuation, lowercase and capital letters, as well as international letters). It really is a beautiful font and comes expertly crafted in four different styles so you can mix and match!
Of course there are several other free Harry Potter fonts out there, you may recall that the popular Harry P was used in my Harry Potter Gold, Silver, and Bronze Text tutorial, and works very well for simple projects. However Hocus Pocus comes with the added bonus of a shifting baseline and calculated spacing and kerning – something that needed to be adjusted for with the free fonts in the tutorial. Hocus Pocus will thus allow you more time to create, and less time adjusting the font, which is always a plus in my book! So apparate over to Hocus Pocus font page and support beautiful typography.
I developed this (super easy) technique for turning a photo into a glorified pixel-y type sketch while racking my brain for a new Facebook picture. It is partly inspired by the awesome Threadless shirt I’m wearing. This is something fun you can do quickly, and with one of your own pictures!
With Halloween coming up soon, consider creating one of this for your Ghost self.
Head on after the break for the full tutorial!
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For freelancers or small start-up businesses, creating an identity is one of the most important things you can do. Potential clients will judge whether your designers are worth hiring based on the quality of your own logo, website, or print materials. However, while the former two can be created without a huge investment in a monetary sense, having business cards or posters custom-printed always seems to be expensive.
Enter PsPrint, an online printing service. Aside from an impressive variety of services they offer (from business cards to posters, brochures to doorhangers), the price is very affordable for newcomers trying to get off the ground. Compared to large printing chain companies (at least in my local area), PsPrint beats their price by selling at 25% the cost. Other online printing services also have the unfortunate habit of only offering product in large ‘minimum quantities’ – PsPrint, while still having a minimum quantity purchase, is considerably smaller than these other companies, allowing for experimentation without the steep price!
Besides using these printing services to make your own identity known, consider referring them to your clients. As a designer, if you can provide a killer poster design for a band, AND get physical, printed copies for them as well, it will give you a step up over the competition!
This has been a sponsored post.
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It takes a while to get to grips with Photoshops’ many shortcuts, but there is no denying that once you have learned the major ones productivity increases massively. This allows you to spend more time on the design and less time hitting F1 or randomly looking through the tools pane for ‘that tool you know you used 10 minutes ago.’
No matter how long you have been using Photoshop it’s a safe bet that every now and again you need a command you don’t know the shortcut for. Print out these handy guides and put them close by so you can learn as you go along. I have elected to print out the shortcuts in function order and have them attached to the wall above my screen – it’s a little embarrassing how many I don’t actually know!
Insanely Great Tees has two Insanely Great Photoshop-Themed shirts!
One features a sampling of the Photoshop Toolkit, the other the Magic Eraser (otherwise known as the undo shortcut). More astute readers will realize that the undo shortcut isn’t restricted to Photoshop … but those of us that live and breathe the program will probably not give that much thought. 
Check em out:
At only $17 buckaroos a piece (minus shipping) and a bunch of different sizes to choose from printed on snuggly all-cotton American Apparel, pick up one or ten to show your love of Photoshop to whoever stares at your chest!
[Via PixelPusher]
Source
This is it. You’ve worked your fingers to the bone learning all the Photoshop shortcuts. Your eyes are burning from squinting at a humming screen for hours on end, carefully positioning elements and designing art. Your brain’s abuzz with the knowledge you’ve acquired through reading tutorials and your own experimentation. And all the blood and tears have finally paid off – YOU, the Photoshop Enthusiast, are now PRETTY SWELL at designing!
What do you do now with your new-found superpowers? Sure, you could save damsels in distress, stop bridges from falling, develop a broom to ride to the moon … or you could raise some money to pay for next month’s rent or that slick Segway you’ve been eying. In this exclusive mini series by the Minty Ferret, I’ll show YOU how to turn those hard-earned Photoshop skills into a form of income. That’s right, you can make money with Photoshop working at home! Outlined in this mini-series is a tutorial on how exactly to do just that. Some of these techniques are used by professionals, some are controversial, some make you money while you sleep!
Let’s start with that last one. Stretch, yawn, and head on after the break to learn how to make a passive income – and keep on checking back in the weeks to come or RSS me for more moolah methods!
I just stumbled across this free Photoshop Cloud Brush Set from the PixlPusher.
Suffice to say, the quality of this set simply blew me away. These are hi-res brushes (some are over 2500pixels) and are simply breath-taking. Kudos to the maker, not only is this a beautiful set but useful as well!
Head on over and give em a download!
Web 2.0 Badge Tutorial
Learn how to easily create one of those trendy Web 2.0 badges. PSD file and a package of pre-made badges are included!
