Well, yet another good contest went down, and the winners have been chosen. Thanks to the folks at Designious for their generosity, and for making the contest possible. Here are the winners…

Giga Pack winners:

• afterman
• Mike Lee
• CaseyJon611
• Pamela
• Dina

6 Month Vectorious.net subscription winners:

• Igor
• Vicky Wilson
• RC
• JimHere
• adamXYL
• Jonne
• Freyja
• Heidi
• Tim
• barth

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I wanted to try out some more experimental grunge textures this week and this is what I came up with, a nice set of dark and grungy textures. Each textures is actually 4-5 different textures combined in different layers in Photoshop to get the end result. I tried to give each texture it’s own “feeling”, if that makes any sense. Hopefully you guys get some good use out of them, enjoy!

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Once again, I’ve got some freebie goodness for everyone this week. Our friends at Designious.com are offering up 5 giga packs and ten 6 month subscriptions to Vectorious.net. Good luck everyone!

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment.
• Only comment once.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Comments will remain open until Tuesday, November 3rd.

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Ahhh yes…the venerable rust texture. Rust can be one of the most useful textures when trying to add a hint (or a lot) of grunge to your designs or photos, very handy. Make sure you don’t miss our first installment of rust textures. Enjoy!

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Not to long ago, Adobe released a free app for the iPhone called Photoshop.com Mobile. It’s obviously and image editor, but it’s usefulness comes from tying directly into your Photoshop.com account. The app is limited to some basic editing features, but I must say, it’s quite nice for a first try.

You can choose a photo or take a photo to start editing.

The app has some simple, but nice features including color effects, crop, rotate, image effects, sketch and more. When your done, you can save or upload directly to your free Photoshop.com account for easy retrieval from any internet connected computer. Furthermore, users can connect to their Photoshop.com account and have access to their entire Photoshop.com library directly from the iPhone.

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If you’ve ever run into this annoying little Illustrator problem, it can be very frustrating, but it has a simple fix. Every so often you may find that no matter what color you select, Illustrator converts your selection to grayscale…

Why? Well if you open your Color palette (Window>Color), you’ll most likley find that it’s set to grayscale. (like below)

All you have to do is set your color palette to something else, like RGB or CMYK. Now you’re good to go. Personally, I have no idea why this problem has made it all the way to CS4. If I wanted to fill a shape with a gray, I’d choose a gray.

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Time for something a little different today: plastic shopping bag textures! I’m not exactly sure what application these textures will have, but I’m sure you guys can find something awesome to use them for. I have to give a shout out to Callum from Circlebox Blog for the last two textures. Enjoy!

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If there’s one good thing that can come from living in the middle of nowhere, it’s the fact that we have lots of old and decrepit buildings around…ripe with awesome textures. These textures came from an old glass recycling plant that we have around here that hasn’t been open for decades I’m sure. I’m really tempted to sneak inside to see what kind of textures I can find inside too. Enjoy!

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I gotten a few emails recently about how to create a seamless diagonal pattern in Illy, so here we go! Illustrator comes with some default pattern brushes, but no diagonal love. Diagonal patterns are a bit more tricky to make than a simple horizontal, or vertical pattern, but with some rock solid alignment, and some manual input into the Transform palette, you’ll be making diagonal patterns in no time. Let’s get started.

1. Start with a “square” artboard.

It doesn’t really matter what size but if you want to follow along, I’m using a 600px x 600px artboard.

2. Create your vertical line.

Again, the size and shape is up to you here.

3. Align your shape to the top right corner

Here we are going to be using the Transform pallete to make or shape align exactly to the upper left corner. Select your shape and in the Transform, set the “X” value to 0, and the “Y” value to 600 (or the document size you chose). The middle of your shape should now be aligned exactly to the upper left corner.

4. Rotate 45 degrees.

Next, rotate your shape 45 degrees either using your mouse and holding Shift, or right click, and enter the value in manually.

5. Duplicate your shape and align it to the opposite corner.

Now we need to duplicate or shape, and align it the same way we did above, but to the opposite corner. Again,select your new shape, and using the Transform pallete, set your X value to 600 (or the document size you chose) and the Y value to 0. Now your two shapes should be aligned perfectly to opposite corners of the artboard.

6. Make a Blend between the 2 shapes.

Using the Blend tool click on 1 of your shapes, then immediately click on the other to make a blend. Then double click on the Blend tool, and you should see the ‘Blend Options” dialogue box. Set it to “Specifed Steps” and then select a number that you think looks good. I recommend making this an odd number. You should have something that resembles the image below.

7. Expand your blend.

Select your new blend, and then go to Object > Expand, then click “OK.”

8. Create a square to crop with.

Select the Rectangle tool, and click once on the aretboard. You can now enter in the exact dimensions you want your square to be. Set it to 600 x 600px (or the document size you chose), and click “OK.”

9. Align your square to the artboard.

Select your square, and in the Align pallete, make sure you have “Align to Artboard” selected.

Now hit these 2 buttons to align your square exactly on top of the artboard.

10. Crop.

Do a Select All (Command/Control + A), and then hit the Crop button in the Pathfinder pallete.

Done!

Now you have a nice, seamless diagonal pattern that can be put to use.

If you want to add this pattern as a Pattern Swatch, just select it, and then go to Edit, Define Pattern, and it will appear in your swatches pallete.

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We’ve got some lucky people on our hands! I’d like to congratulate the winners of the free resources from ArtBox7.com. Matthew Miner was the big winner and will take home the complete set! The other 10 winners who will each get a vector pack, brush pack, and icon pack are: @echoenduring, @dauzu, Keshett, @haveinmindesign, @jenreed, @samjessup, jodi, Thorvald, Lexy, and Darryl. Thanks to ArtBox7.com for a great contest!

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The seasons, they are a changin’. Which means that it’s time for some fall leaf textures! If you like what you see here I posted a really big set of leaf textures last fall over on Lost and Taken. Enjoy and happy fall!

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Time for some more free stuff people. This week our friends at ArtBox7.com are offering tons of free resources up for grabs! We’ve got a ton of vectors to give away, as well as premium brush sets and vector icons. This time I’m changing the rules just a bit so read them carefully. From now on I’d like everyone to include their twitter username (if you have one) in your comment so I can tweet to the winners! Anyway, good luck everyone!

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment, and include your twitter username (if you have one)
• Retweet this post (optional)
• Only comment once.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Comments will remain open until Sunday, October 4th.

The Prizes:

• 1 winner will receive: One Complete Set (this includes the Supreme Vector Set, Supreme Brush Set and Supreme Icon Set) with extended license (worth $259)
• 10 additional winners will receive: 1 Vector Set, 1 Brush Set, and 1 Icon Set each. (also with an extended license)

Good luck everyone!

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Today I’m revisiting one of my all time favorite texture sets, old film textures. I originally posted a big set on Lost and Taken and then the first set here on Bittbox. A cool side note: these textures were featured in a recent article in Photoshop User magazine, it’s good to see my textures being used!

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Congratulations to Chrissy, Divian, and Timmothy, the 3 lucky winners of a shiny new copy of Brush Pilot. Thanks to everyone for participating! I hope you enjoy the app :)

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A while back I posted the first set of light grunge textures and they were a pretty big hit, so here’s a follow up set to the original. I have to send out a quick thanks to my friend Callum Chapman for providing some of the textures I used to create this set. Hope you guys find them useful!

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How about we start off the week with some free software! I’ve got another 3 copies of Brush Pilot to give away this week. Brush Pilot is a fast, easy to use Photoshop Brush previewer for Mac OS X. Read the rules after the jump and good luck!

Visit BrushPilotApp.com to download a demo and read more details.

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment. (tweeting is appreciated)
• Only comment once.
• 3 winners will be randomly chosen from the comments.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Please only comment if you have a Mac.
• Comments will remain open until Thursday, September 24th.

Here’s a quick overview of what Brush Pilot can do.

Instantly finds all your brushes, fast.

Seperates uninstalled from installed brushes

Single click installation into all installed Photoshop Versions on your machine.

Reveal file locations in Finder.

View names and pixel dimensions of each brush.

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Every once in awhile I shoot or create an awesome single texture, but fail to make enough for a whole set. These textures inevitably just end up sitting around on my computer going unused and unshared…which is a shame, because I think they can be very useful in their own right. So, I thought I’d make a non-themed post on here in order to share some of these random textures I have laying around…I hope you like them!

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Here’s a quick and dirty way to space objects using Illustartor’s Blend tool. Havent done a video in a while, or an Illy post, so it’s back to the basics this week! Hope you like it :)

Illustrator: Blend Tool Spacing from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.

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Ahhh yes…the venerable paper texture, arguably the most desired and utilized texture in today’s designs. Today I’m offering up a nice set of brown paper textures with a nice little hint of grunge to them. These should come in handy for website backgrounds, adding a nice subtle texture to your illustrations, or…well, for whatever other uses you mind find for them. Enjoy!

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And now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for. The winner of the 2TB hard drive is Ashley B! Congrats to Ashley, and thanks to everyone for participating. This was the most ppopular contest to date on BittBox with over 1000 entries. (note to self: people really, really like external hard drives) A specail thanks goes out to MediaMilitia for making the contest possible.

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