New Valentine freebies

My treat for this week - two cute Valentine frames textures. They are made especially for the Second Life residents, but they can be also used for blogs or web pages.

Browsing SL Marketplace, I saw that aren't many beautiful, elaborated frames textures for Valentines and only few are worth their money. So I created these frame textures as a gift for all my customers and visitors who are in love somewhere in Second Life or Real Life. If they are not yet, I'll hope they will be,

The textures can be used also as wedding frames, and people in SL love to marry and, well, to divorce.

Does not cost much and it is fun. But always love is in the air. The frames are on transparent background. Click on the image and save it. Enjoy! Check also my free Vintage Valentine and Gothic Valentine cards in my previous posts, and my Marketplace textures store for more frames.

Freebies textures business in Second Life

For the texture hunters the Internet is a huge treasure. If you know where to look you will find tons of good textures, backgrounds, wallpapers no restriction to use.

That made  some people in SLvery happy. They hurry up to make money by reselling internet freebies.

Some of them have the decency to put only the upload price, but others sell them up to 5 or 6 times the price. So instead paying 10 Lindeni for a single texture - that is the price to upload an image in SL -, you pay 50 L; and because are not sold as single textures you have to buy an entire pack and spend more money.

For example, the "Grayscale natural grunge" pack you see in the image bellow contains 6 textures and it is sold in SL for 300 L, that is more than 1 dollar.

The same textures you can download for free from the site webtreats.mysitemyway.com - see the second photo.

Actually, one SL merchant kept the title and the content, changing only the logo and the author name, and  wrote in the description that you can not share them or resale them as textures. He is wrong. Actually you can do that because the textures and the patterns from webtreats are "free to use in both personal and commercial projects", as is clearly specified in "Usage and attributions".

This SL merchant - you can easy find out who he is browsing Marketplace - sells a large selection of webtreats textures, especially grunge - and is not the only one. Two other merchants sell both the same Medieval cottage textures taken from Genetica site and another big Photoshop backgrounds collection.

One SL seller has downloaded his products from http://www.heroturko.org/ and other sites. Compare the "Dark & sweet" pack for sale on Marketplace and the Collection of gothic backgrounds for Photoshop on heroturko.org and you will see that many are identical. At least this merchant does not charge you more than the upload price and does not put any restriction to use. Pretty fair.

I'm not 100% original neither. I also use photoshop resources made by others, like brushes, patterns, shapes or even textures, but I integrate them in my work. They are meant to be used for creating original textures, like textures are meant to be used in a build. Between a brush applied on a layer and the final texture it is a long way, and what you see at the end express me and nobody else.

In SL are some great professional textures designers. I respect them and I admire their work. Buy from them and browse the Internet for little treasures. Soon you will be very rich.

This is my treat, a Gothic Valentine card for all who love the dark side. Click on and save it.

Once upon a time Valentine

In the last two days I made Vintage Valentine greetings cards. I made vintage Valentine cards because they send a message of innocence hard to find these days. I used pictures of kids, cats, flowers, lace, frames, and few hearts on old paper. The envelope background is not my idea; I saw an image at it and I liked it, then I replicated in Photoshop, using a high resolution paper, a heart made with a shape and a stamp printed with a brush. I aged the paper and gave it those burned colors with the gradient tool. I did not use Gradients too often before but now I'm a big fun of it. They can transform the poorest photo into a piece of art and they make a green grass scene to look like an alien landscape. If you want to see a sample read this tutorial "Stylish colors effects with alpha channels" at http://www.clippingdesign.com/blog/stylish-color-effects-with-alpha-channel/ . It is really useful if you want to create nice backgrounds or manipulate photographies. I used 2 or even more Gradient layers, playing with pastels and custom Gradients, downloaded for free. Old photo Gradients that I used you can find here: http://www.brusheezy.com/Gradients/16033-Old-Photo-Gradients. I learned many things about Photoshop by mistakes or by accident. The best lesson I took is this: the more layers I use, the less are the chances to compromise my entire work. If I don't like the gradient effect on my texture, for example, I simply delete the layer, create a new one, and apply other gradient without damaging my hard worked piece.

In the case that you are interested in all kind of PS stuff and want to see what others have created, I can give you a good resource: visit http://lordofdesign.com/ . I could spend hours there, like a kid in a candy shop. I hope you like my VintageValentine candies too.