my name is mwd

Although I’ve had Pixelmator, the image drawing/editing application for the Mac, for a while, I’ve not had much chance to explore it. Part the problem with applications in the Photoshop-a-like category is just knowing where to begin – they have so many options you just don’t know where to start.

Thankfully there are some good tutorials on the web if you can find them that take you step by step through some of the features, which both tells you what the features are and how you can begin to combine them to get some of the effects you want. Recently I’ve been trying some of the tutorials at Abduzeedo, which have a few nice Pixelmator specific tutorials.

For example, here’s a photo of Laura I took and turned into a kind of comic-book effect:

Very wimpy here – I picked that picture of Laura based on her hat – it meant when I cut her out from the beach she was stood on I didn’t have to deal with fiddly hair bits :) You can see the original here.

Also, you can very quickly come up with ambient images for desktops and such:

Not the best example in the world, but it was relatively easy to make, and quite nice to see how to build these things up with layers. If you have a MacBook then you can grab a desktop sized version here.

Other tutorial recommendations welcome – if nothing else it’s a nice excuse to play with my graphics tablet once in a while :)