In a recent campaign to promote the creative retouching services that Ardis offers to photographers and art directors in South Florida, we showed how we can take a bland stock photo and create striking surrealistic compositions. You can see the pictures in our campaign (and their creation process) in our new retouching page, but in this tutorial we decided to let you into one more secret and show you step by step how we created the beautiful porcelain mask that you can see in the composition below.

Note: this is not a beginners’ tutorial, but a little more advanced. It assumes that you already know to work your way around Photoshop. This tutorial also teaches you a couple of techniques of digital painting, so it really helps if you’re equipped with a graphic tablet. However, you can still get great results using a mouse only.

The image above is what we’re going to achieve at the end of this tutorial (click on it to enlarge it). It is up to your imagination to incorporate it in your own fantasy world and create a story around it.

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So you have a beautiful website, and you have tried many SEO techniques. Most of them do not work and are also costly in the long run. But a tool available for quite some time now could have been overlooked for many years. Indeed, a blog is a sure way to promote your website and draw traffic, hence, customers.

The idea is to teach people about your industry by posting articles on your blog and sharing these articles on other blogs. By doing this, you will create interest toward your articles and links to your website!

Here are a few pointers:

• never use the blog to directly sell something of your website, that is just poor blogging etiquette
• post at least 2 articles per week on your blog and link them to other blogs
• write quality articles that you think people would be interested enough to leave comments

That’s it! Happy blogging!

With so many options to choose form, shopping has turned from a necessity to an experience. So why would online shopping be any less? The face of e-commerce has changed from its beginner years and has out on a more exciting look. Smashing Magazine has collected 45 examples of creative and unusual designs of online-stores. Click on the image below to read the article:

And don’t forget: Creative is who we are! So if you’re in need of an online shop that is as unique as your business, Ardis Creative can help. We are very experience in e-commerce and our ideas are always fresh and exciting. And that’s what your customers need in their shopping experience!

Stock up for the winter season with all the resources for your graphic design needs. We have collected for you a series of 35+ free goodie packages like vectors, brushes, icons, textures, backgrounds & illustrations,  WordPress themes and tutorials. Have fun!

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It’s true - people do judge a book by its cover. Photogrpahy and graphics have a great influence on the buying decisions during shelf-browsing. But how many times have you been disappointed by what goes beyond the attractive first impression? Check the website below to see how accurately you can guess a good book by judging its cover (the application compares your rating with the Amazon rating of the respective book).

Note: “good:” is here rather a measure of marketability (popularity).