Yes, I do realize that www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com is down.

And I apologize for any inconvenience this is causing. I am in contact with my hosting provider, and have been having to wait 2-4 hours for a response all day long. They keep telling me things that are wrong, and I keep telling them that I’ll fix them but that I can’t do so until they give me permissions to my brushes folder back… and so on and so forth.

It’s driving me nuts.

I feel like, with 6000+ visitors a day, I have a responsibility to keep this website up. And so I feel awful when it’s down like this, since it apparently has been since yesterday (I didn’t receive an email when they took it down, either - I had to find out via email from all of you!)

I may be having to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server, or something else that will allow for the kind of usage that this site has.

Most of the problem seems to have come from one single IP, which I have since blocked. The cause for this problem was 250+ simultaneous Apache connections, and many/most of them seem to have come from this one IP. I’m not even sure what would cause that kind of a thing. I’m going to be looking for some kind of a script that limits the number of simultaneous Apache requests that come from a single IP (I know that some blogs have plugins that do it, so it must be possible), so that this doesn’t happen again.

In the meantime, please sit back and have some patience while I bang my head on the table about a bajillion times whilst waiting for a response to my ticket (no phone support on the weekends = teh suckage). Anybody know of a great web host that has 24/7 technical support via PHONE? And that has VPS and/or dedicated servers?

If I can’t get this resolved over the weekend because of how slow the ticket system is, I will DEFINITELY have it back up on Monday. This’ll be the longest my website’s ever been down.

Thanks for your patience, guys!

 In the meantime, there is another place that you can download my brushes!

http://www.redheadstock.deviantart.com

Interestingly, St. Patrick’s Day has been moved from its usual March 17th spot this year to March 15th. “Uh… wha?”, right? Well, the Vatican approved it last year, and it was done to avoid conflict with “Holy Week” this year. This marks the first time the date has been changed since 1940. The next conflict with Holy Week is not expected until 2160.

But, it’s looking like many (maybe even most) people are still going to be celebrating it on the 17th, regardless. The St. Patrick’s Festival Committee in Dublin confirmed that the parade would remain on the 17th, as per usual. And people that live in Ireland will still be given the 17th off of work, as a national holiday. So, it appears that only the religious events surrounding St. Patrick’s Day will be changing dates.

Just thought I’d share that little bit of interesting info with you all, in preparation for this week’s set of Photoshop brushes!

This set is mostly made up of shamrocks and clovers, including both three and four leaf clovers (for luck!). Some are scattered, some are textured, some glittery, others are sporting some pretty Celtic designs, and there’s even a few swirls with shamrock designs thrown in! Also included are a leprechaun, a pot of gold, and the letters “St. Patrick’s Day” spelled in clovers.

These are fairly high resolution, with the average brush size being about 1900 pixels. Most are vectors.

Hope that everyone has a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day, regardless of which day you “celebrate” it.

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

This latest set of Photoshop brushes is made up of various “urban” vector designs. Some of the items are very recognizable as urban, or something that you’d find in a city. Others are designs, like various circles and such, that tend to go along with urban-based designs. If you check out my preview image, you’ll see what I mean! I’m sure you’ve seen these designs before.

All of these are very high resolution, with the average brush size being about 1600 pixels (some smaller ones are 1200 or so, the larger ones are 2100 or so).

Includes: barbed wire, buildings, chain link fence, various circles, street lamps, miscellaneous vector designs, razor wire, smoke, a smokestack, vector splatters, telephone poles, and more!

Go Now to the Downloads Page!

Just a quick plug… some of you may have visited the Obsidian Dawn homepage and seen that I changed it into a portal for my various websites (and parts of Obsidian Dawn).  There is a link to here, my older artwork that was originally on Obsidian Dawn’s homepage, my graphic design info, my scrapbooking stuff (which is also now free, btw), AND a new website where I’ll be displaying all of my new artwork.   Most of it will be fantasy and nature related, and it’s going to be my professional portfolio.  I’m starting to get to a point where I think I’m decent enough to work as an artist professionally, so once I get a few more pieces in there I’m going to try to get some work at various companies (perhaps some fantasy trading card games, etc).  There’s just two paintings up there so far, but please feel free to check it out at Rainne.com!

Random Brushes Tip:

In the upper right hand corner of your Photoshop window is the “Brushes” tab (if you can’t find it, hit F5 to open it). You can drag that tab outside of that small docking area if you’re going to be doing a lot of work with your brush settings. Just click and drag it outside of the docking area, and where you drop it, a Brushes window will be created.

You can, in fact, drag all of your different tabs around like that. If you want your layers and channels tabs in separate windows, you can drag and drop one of them outside of the other to separate them.

Don’t worry, you can put them back where they were, too. If you drag and drop a tab next to another one, you will merge them into the same window… including that small docking area up at the top where the “Brushes” tab started out.

This can make it much easier if you’re planning on working in a particular tab a good deal. It’s also a great way to get rid of some stuff when you’re not using it much!

(If you want to change the order of the tabs, drag them outside of the window temporarily and then drag them back into the window in the REVERSE order from how you’d like them to appear from left to right. In other words, the most recent tab that you dragged into any particular area will always appear on the right side.)

No release this week, sorry. I was planning to do a tutorial, and I hope to get that out by next week. However, this is a pretty busy time for me.

I have bronchitis, and haven’t felt much up to anything this week. I’m away from home and have been for 3 weeks, so it’s been hard to do much work. I’m going back home this weekend, and then the next week my hubby, who is in the Army, is leaving for Iraq.

So, nothing this week. But I should have time next week to do the tutorial I was meaning for this week while he’s packing and getting ready.

I’m also working on both of my tribal sets, to make them into MUCH higher resolution brushes. Same shapes and whatnot, but about 2000 pixels tall/wide. I may hopefully release one of those soon, perhaps along with the tutorial next week.

Hope that everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving.

As any of you that have been on my mailing list know, I recently switched over to allowing Feedburner to email out my updates. I tested it out last week and it was fine, and I know of people that have been using this service for quite a while without any trouble.

Ironically enough, on the very day that I decided to release my first brush set and allow these email updates to take care of it, Feedburner had some rare trouble with their system. Those emails still haven’t gone out - or if they did, I didn’t receive one.

So I’m writing this in hopes of letting everyone know that I DID release a new brush set yesterday, and you may still receive the old update about it at some point, but I didn’t want people to have to wait any longer to know there was a new brush set out. So, I figured I’d write another post in hopes that this one would go out to everyone. *crosses fingers*

Sorry for the inconvenience, and as I understand it, this is a very rare problem and I just have the worst luck in the world, apparently.

SO.. that’s enough blabbing. The new brush set is…

Ghost Photoshop Brushes

A Photoshop brush set made up of various ghostly images. Includes both faces and figures that you can add to photos, paintings, etc to make them look like they’re captured images of ghosts! Some scary looking, some just kind of standing there, some with flowing gowns and hair, others with old vintage clothing and poses, some soldiers, children, brides, a woman holding a baby, and all kinds of stuff! These are big, with the average size being about 1000 pixels tall or wide.

Go Now to the Downloads Page!