Building Backgrounds

[Hackey Sack]

Okay does anybody know any good sites where I can get some free backgorunds, mostly the types such as on sites like 2advanced.com and ohter places like that. or do these people make these backgorunds? if so can I make them in flash I have no drawing programs and, so if this is possible please can you give me some pointers. THANKS

[mg33]

Yes. these people make these graphics. They don't get them from anywhere. Just once I wish someone would refer to those graphics without using 2Advanced as a reference. (This is nothing personal. I just get frustrated when all I see are 2Advanced references-there's so much more out there than 2Advanced. If you were in my shoes you'd want to tear your hair out sometimes. )
Have you ever checked out

http://www.vir2l.com ?
http://www.designgraphik.com/ ?
http://www.submethod.com/?

As for creating them, I'll tell you the same thing I tell anyone else: Practice, practice, practice, practice, hours and hours and weeks and weeks and months and months of practice, and more practice, and even more practice.

That's how you do it. Photoshop, various 3D programs, other graphics programs are all used to create images like on 2Advanced. You can't make them in Flash, however. You can make some pretty cool graphics in Flash, but the graphics you're reffering to are NOT created in Flash...

Like I said, it takes so much practice, creativity, imagination, trial and error, and patience to create graphics similiar to that. Not everyone can do it.

FYI-I'm working on my new site that will be out May 1st. The current site is at http://www.mg33.net . This week I've been on spring break from college and I've easily spent around 20 hours working on new ideas in photoshop. Most of it I did not even bother saving. Just playing around with different ideas and techniques, copying off new images from current ones and seeing where it takes me.

If you check out my site, in the main site, the blue background image-that image evolved over a 7 month period from when I first made it to when it became how it is on my site. Things take a while, sometimes you just leave them be and get back to them later. It's so much fun and it's just incredible when you look back on where you started and where you are now.

Hopefully that's some good advice for you. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions you may have about graphics or to take a look at anything you've done. I'm on the home stretch towards college graduation in May, but I always have time to help out.

Take Care,

mg33

[flipsideguy]

to practice you could import a scan of an object into flash and start tracing over it with the tools in Flash. Or you could draw/paint stuff by hand and scan. How can you survive without Photoshop????????????????????????????????

[rugbystud]

HERE'S A TIP!

Scan in something with loads of texture, then go mad with filters - u really can get some totally original stuff just by experimenting. My fav's the Motion blur, if u scan something in then motion blur it something like 300 pixels horizontally u can get some cool 'widescreen' look, then apply text and hundreds of layers.

1 of the biggest files I had something like 30 channels and the maximum amount of layers, whatever that was - i had to keep merging them down as ur only allowed a specific amount of layers...

[XLR8]

-=Sometimes I feel like an instructor, otherwise I feel in desperate need of instruction=-

There is a difference between graphics. Intense and rich in color, images, and texture are usually composed in a pixel based editing program (i.e. Adobe Photoshop). While many shapes and, sorry to say it, but a lot of time more generic graphics are composed using flash's primitive drawing tools, or with the aid of a program like Adobe Illustrator. -X