So, I’m actually pretty pleased with how the artwork for the This Is It 2008 mix turned out. Trust me when I say that there was a lot of deliberation and more than one piece of half finished artwork before I came up with this concept. Because I am such a generous guy and this is the season of giving, I thought I’d treat you to a bit of artwork. Hit the button below to download your own desktop background of the expanded cover art.

If you’ve been disappointed by the range of sizes (0r lack there of) of the previous desktops that I’ve released, fear not I have taken the time to recreate this artwork in a range of sizes for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy

Snitily Carr’s print design department participates in a monthly creative exercise where we all come together for an hour or so in the afternoon to flex our muscles. We take turns playing host and coming up with the activity, and November happened to be my month. I decided to get everyone to join in on one of my favorite creative pastimes, making desktop wallpapers.

Creating a wallpaper is great for passing the time between projects or when you just need to take a small break from someone’s design standards. It gives you a chance to do whatever you want, the only guideline to follow is you monitor’s resolution. Granted it also helps if your icons are still visible as well. I usually have a couple in process wallpapers on my computer for such occasions.

For this creative activity I wanted to keep our wallpapers somewhat work related, so I took Snitily Carr’s nine guiding principals and threw them into a hat, which happened to be a bowl. After drawing our individual guiding principal, we took to our computers and set forth to create. The principal that I pulled out of the hat was:

I have a little treat for you. If you are a return customer you might have noticed that I changed up my header. Now you might be asking yourself, “Did Matt suddenly find religion and has now joined a Satanic cult?” The answer is no and no. What I did find was a bit of the Halloween spirit. Which to me means ghosts, goblins, guts, and gore. Sure, candy is all well and good, but as I get older I find that I can’t stomach the sweet stuff as much as I use to. On that note, feel free to download yourself a merry little bleeding skull desktop wallpaper for this very special day.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I like to dig out the good stuff on Halloween, and then I like to try to force on those around me. So, sit back and enjoy a couple of classics from one the all-time great horror-rock bands Misfits.

Alright, I’ve finally gotten around to offering a desktop wallpaper of my own. There was a time when I loved to make my own custom wallpapers, but those days seem so far gone. Now I just stick to whatever simple default image I can find. Sure I’ve done some for clients here and there, but I’ve never made one just for you my loyal readership. So, I did it, I made a new wallpaper just for you, okay it’s for me, but you can have it too. This all came about while I was waiting for my laundry to get done last night. I was just screwing around with my tablet, feeling all inspired and shit from yesterday’s post about Andrew Jone’s cover art for the new Soulfly album. First I was playing with Alchemy a bit, which is a fun little piece of software, but you don’t get the full effect without a mic, so I shelved it for the time being. Then I opened up everyone’s favorite app, Photoshop, and just started using random homemade brushes with tweaked out settings. You know, just pulling out shapes to see what I got. Once I found the foundation of the image, I threw in some vector shapes for texture—drawn with BittBox brushes. Ta-da, a 1280×1024 treat for all the boys and girls.

Next up in the litany of free photoshop brushes I’d like to present to you the Photogram Series 1 brush set. For those of you who don’t know what a photogram is check out wikipedia for the answers. I made these photograms in late 2003 early 2004 during my photography class. I have to say that this was by far the best part of the class. Anyway, I made them, they turned out great, and have been sitting at the bottom of my closet ever since. Luckily, I did take the time to scan them in before I forgot about them completely.

I’ve used them here and there as texture elements in various projects, so for now I’m keeping the originals to myself. They might find their way into the gallery on of these days, who knows. Needless to say, these brushes are but small pieces of the originals, I’ve cropped and cleaned them up because of their interesting texture, tone, and random shape. This brush set is rather eclectic, in that some are small nebulous shapes and others are large splatters and scratches. These are all things that come out of a little patience and experimentation in the darkroom.

I am proud to present to you the first installment of the “Brick Brush Project.” It is pretty much what it sounds like, a series of brick textured Photoshop brushes. Now, you might ask, “Proj, there are a million PS brushes out there, what’s so great about these?”

First, that’s kind of a rude question. Secondly, these are high-quality brushes that are A) Awesome and B) Free. Plus they actually have some amount of sentimental value to me. I actually found these—and about fifty others—bricks buried in my backyard when I was transplanting some lilac bushes. After pulling them out of the ground and hosing them off I busted out the camera and went to town snapping pictures for these brushes. I’m sure Ivy thought I’d seriously lost my mind when she found me outside taking pictures of dirty bricks, but it was all for a good cause.

As I said before, these brushes are free for you to use for either personal or commercial projects. However, you may not redistribute them individually or as part of a package. Giving credit is always welcome, so feel free to link back to The Repository if you’d like.