Several years ago the Roswell incident, the Mir Space Station, and the Mars expedition stirred renewed interest in space exploration and extraterrestrials. I couldn't resist jumping on the band wagon. This feature is pure fun but I hope you'll pick up a tip or two — or at least a bit of inspiration.
Using some sketches I'd made previously I put together a small collection of "spacey" images. I've even turned some images into a TrueType Font that you can download. Then I took the graphics, the font, and some freebie images from the Web and made some fun images. Some of these graphics are available here as free Web Graphics for you to use. You'll also find a tutorial on using Combine and Weld (useful for creating fonts in CorelDRAW). Enjoy.
Spacey Dingbat
After creating a few rockets and flying saucers I decided to try my hand at creating a symbol font. I simply followed the instructions in the CorelDRAW 7 manual, exporting 26 characters (A-Z) as a TrueType symbol font called
Spacey JHB (the JHB refers to my initials, of course). You can see a gif of the
complete character set and download the font (sorry, TTF for the PC only). It's free!
One key to successfully creating images for a font is to know how to combine and weld elements that make up the character. I wrote up a brief Combine & Weld tutorial (CorelDRAW) showing the steps.
Spacey Clip Art
Although based on some sketches I'd made months before, I didn't scan these vector images. I created each one from scratch in CorelDRAW 7. There are
16 black & white vector images. One file is in CDR format (saved as v. 7 and v. 5) and the other is in AI (Adobe Illustrator 3) format — exported from Corel. As stated in the readme.txt file, you are free to use these images (not redistribute the collection) but I'd certainly appreciate a credit or at least an email to tell me about how you modified and used any of these images.
Spacey Web
For those of you who want some ready-made art for your Web pages, I've colorized some of the images from my Spacey Clip Art.
Grab individual images from the page or download an archive of all the images. Again, these are free for your use. I'd certainly appreciate a credit line or link back if you use them, but it's not required. You'll also find links to other spacey clip art on the Web.
