I have been thinking of doing a cartoon version of one of my favorite characters, Agatha Christies’ Detective Hercule Poirot, always portrayed as a strong willed and serious man. Doing such an intellectual and grumpy looking character in a cartoon fashion sounded like a funny idea to me. So I got my pencil and drew and colored it entirely on Photoshop CS3.

I was browsing the other day and saw a Sony-Ericsson Xperia X1 with a beautiful wallpaper on it and thought to myself "Can I make one that looks like it but using only GIMP?" And guess what? I could! And with this tutorial so can you. Step 1 We first create a new document, you can make it any size, though I used 1600 x 1200. Setting by default Black as your Foreground color, we can ask in the advanced options to use it as our background.

This week on Designers Book Shelf I got a lot of reading suggestions for you. Every Tuesday I will be posting new suggestions of books for designers and everyone that loves design and art in general. Check out what I have for you this week and stay tuned for more next week.

This post will show a side of Portugal that most of us are not familiar with! Portugal is a country rich in culture, neighbor of Spain, the country is located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Its cities give us the sensation of another era, where modernity blends with nature and the beauty of the landscapes makes us really want to go there to visit.

Born in Russia, Vladimir Tomin is the true definition of a graphic illustrator and designer. He has worked professionally with the likes of MTV Worldwide, Reebok, and Adidas, to name a few. From motion graphics to digital art, he does it all! That's why we're featuring him here on Abduzeedo. Enough said, we know his work will inspire you! For more information we highly recommend that you visit Tomin's portfolio at Space-Jump

Vera Oosterhof is an 18 year-old illustrator hailing from Rottum, Netherlands. She attends Minerva: Academy for Arts in the Netherlands, and hopes to pursue a career in graphic design and illustration in the near future. A member of slashTHREE, Oosterhof has strived to create fantastic artwork while maintaining a good reputation in the art community. I took the time to sit down and have a chat with her. Here’s what went down:

Saint-Petersburg based Russian illustrator Evgeny Kiselev never stops and draws everywhere he goes. No matter that is in a tube station or snorkeling in Asia, he always finds inspiration from enjoying life. He started freelance work a few years ago after being squeezed in local creative agencies where he got professional experience. The lack of academic background hadn't changed the way he creates and even improved the will to tie his life with graphics and visualization.

Dragons have long been presented as powerful, fierce or cool creatures, and those images are what would always come into our mind when we are talking about this incredible creature.

In this reader tutorial Nikola Lazarevic aka Colaja from Nis, Serbia will show us how to create a very stylish vintage traveler diary in Photoshop. We will mix brushes with stock photos and blend modes to achieve the effect. Let's take a look at our final image.

Abduzeedo means Abducted in Portuguese and our theme always has this space feel, with stars, sun flares and everything else necessary to a very cool space scene. It's been quite a while since the last time we posted some really cool wallpapers with this subject, because of that we selected 20 incredible sunrise images for you. Sunrise in Space