At ElipseAgency we’re taking 15 days off work, and we’re coming back Jan. 17th. During this period we will not be answering any emails, but we will sure do when we get back.

I would like to thank all the people that visit the blog everyday, and I’d like to encourage you to keep the Studio83® URL in your browser’s favorites. Early (hopefully) next year, this will become a more open design community, where you will find inspiration, tutorials, exclusive artwork, design theory, free vectors and brushes and many more resources!.

I think that’s about it, see you next year when the “Studio83® Blog” becomes “Studio83®: Design Community”. Until then, happy holidays everybody!

As promised last week, here’s the Studio83® “Reflections” Wallpaper. Based on the same concept as the “Fireworks v2″ design, but with a different take, this 1280×800px widescreen wallpaper is our final artwork upload for the holiday season.

Soon you will be able to download and/or fav this item from the Studio83® galleries at DeviantArt, Flickr, Woomp and MyArtPlot. For the time being, you can download it from our Gallery

Well, the holidays are upon us and Studio83® celebrates this time of the year as usual with Holiday Season Artwork. This year we have two designs. Here’s the first release, “Fireworks v2″ (Fireworks v1 is still available for download at the Studio83® galleries). This was planned to be released tomorrow as I promissed in a previous post, but what the heck, here you have it one day earlier available for download.

Share it, email it, post it in your blogs and please send me your comments!. This is a small gift from Studio83® and ElipseAgency to all of you guys!. Keep checking the blog for the “Reflections” Wallpaper, to be launched next week.

Yet another Inspiration link, here’s another really talented designer. Alberto Cerriteño (Portland, OR) is one of the most talented illustrators I’ve seen in a while. His portfolio is just amazing, and you can check it out at http://www.albertocerriteno.com/.

I’d like to use this post also to let you know that on Friday we’ll be releasing the first of two holiday-season artworks we have prepared for this year. Don’t forget to check “Studio83® Fireworks v2″ out by the end of the week.

To continue with the series of Inspiration links, here’s another really talented designer. His name is Joshua Smith (although he’s better known by his site’s name: “Hydro74″). He’s worked for many top-level clients around the world and he has special talent when it comes to type treatments. His amazing portfolio is online at http://www.hydro74.com/.

I got some emails asking me why the “comments” feature is closed in the Studio83 Blog, and so I decided to post about it. Mainly, the problem we have with comments is our beloved spam. As years go by and technology advances spam seems to be appearing everywhere. I get hundreds of spam emails daily in my inbox, and even though Outlook 2007 does a good job moving them to my Unsolicited Mail folder, I still have to manually check that nothing I wanted or needed was sent there by accident.

The same happens with Blogs!. I know there are now some methods to prevent blog spamming, but given we’re redesigning this blog next year to become a more open design community, I thought we could live without the “comments” feature for a while. If you’d like to communicate with me, please use the “Feedback” form. I usually answer everything but in the blog, so that other visitors like you can receive my answers.

I thought I’d start posting about great designers that inspire me everyday, and so here’s the first of this series of inspirational posts. The artwork you see below was created by Peter Jaworowski a digital/graphic designer from Warsaw, Poland. He’s got many more designs online in his website: http://www.hejz.com/. Hope you enjoy his artwork as much as I do!

Many people have asked me what software I use to create the artwork you see here in the blog, and yesterday I received yet another request for a tutorial or at least a list of the applications I use, so here’s a short post to answer all those questions.

First of all, I use the typical: Adobe Photoshop CS3 and (yes, this is quite weird) I use Adobe Flash CS3 as my main vector editing application (I like Illustrator, but feel much more comfortable using Flash for some reason; I guess this has to do with the fact that I’m using it everyday for web design purposes). That’s it guys, just those two will do to create everything you see here.

Now, for the “Celebration” flyers I’ll be posting soon I’ve also used some Swift 3D v4.5. It’s impressive how this application makes it so easy to import a vector image (AI for example) and turns it into a 3D figure in just one click. Amazing tool!, I encourage you to try it (you can download a free trial at Swift3D.com.

Keep checking the blog!, soon you’ll find more artwork and possibly a couple of tutorials…

Wow!, what a tremendous response to my work!. I’ve had over 100 people sign-up at the site in just a couple of days. The reason?: Studio83® was featured at NotCot.Org, a site that I love and visit every day by the way. Anyway, just a short post to thank all the people that bookmarked me at Flickr and all of you who registered at the site. I got many kind emails and suggestions which I will of course consider (someone suggested a wallpaper for each time of the day, which sounds cool, so stay tuned).

After months of hard work at the agency, I’ve been able to make some time to create new artwork for the Studio83® Blog. It’s named “Hope” and is available for download in JPG 1680×1050 format from our Gallery. Soon I will be uploading this to the Studio83® galleries at DeviantArt, Flickr, Woomp and MyArtPlot. Hope you like this as much as I do!. Thanks to Jari Lehtikangas for the original photo I used for this wallpaper.