The amazing ColourLovers.com community has added a special section for you to download color palettes in WPF and Silverlight formats. You can the use these palettes in Expression Blend. This will help developers get access to a huge library of colors that simply look great! and will also help designers get more inspiration and save sometime by using these palettes as starting points for their own projects.

The ColourLovers.com community now allows you to download 3 new color palette formats (example):

• Expression Design Swatch
• WPF Resource Dictionary
• Silverlight XAML Resources

There is tons you can do with this so we’ve put together a tutorial | Word format | with all the details of how to search for colors in ColourLovers.com, how to download your palette and how to integrate in your Expression Design document, you WPF application or your Silverlight website in Expression Blend.

Studio Aiko, an amazing character design studio in Thailand kindly invited me to participate in her second Monster Party due on Christmas day 2008. You can go to the Monster Party and vote for your favorite character. The idea was to send a monster with christmas/winter theme. I decided to create Elwë the Lizzard. To get to it I got 3 sources of inspiration: 1) a sketch I had drawn a few months ago 2) a Lizzard (or some similar animal) and 3) Will Ferrell’s interpretation of an elf in his Elf movie. Very funny!

I created the entire character in Expression Design using the bezier pen, dynamic colors and effects. I also used a bit of Photoshop to create the furry feel in the coat and hat.

You can download the source Design file for Elwë the Lizzard here… I hope it helps you get some ideas on how to design characters or icons.

What do you get when you mix Will Ferrell’s Elf character with a lizard?

I had drawn this sketch a few months ago… I envisioned it as a little monster with little pointy teeth. I left it there in my sketchbook waiting for the right time to bring it to life.

When Aiko invited me to participate in the Monster Party No. 2 contest for Christmas I thought the original sketch would be great for a monster so scanned the sketch and then used Expression Design bezier pen to draw the outlines… Because this is a Christmas theme I had to dress up my monster with an elf looking suit. I got inspiration from Will Ferrell’s Elf character… he is so funny!

I then realized the eyes were cute but it didn’t really look like a monster or a lizzard so I change the eyes to be more lizzard looking. This kind of removed the cuteness of the character but I liked it more… I continued to add details using the bezier pen. You will also notice I added some surface curves around the head, body and legs which helped me keep track of perspective and angles much better…

Here I gave it the first color pass, just trying to determine the colors for different parts of the lizzard… it all felt too green! but lizzards are kind of green and Will’s suit is green so I decided to make it work somehow using only greens… the risk was for the result to end up looking all green making it hard to separate body from head and tail but the next stage (textures) helped a lot in achieving a good visual result even when it’s all green.

I started adding textures… I got a reptile skin image and applied it using the Screen Blending mode in Expression Design. This is a very subtle reptile skin texture which works well with this cartoon type of character. I loved the result. I played with Opacity to achieve the bumpiness of the reptile skin I wanted.

At the end I took my image into Photoshop and added the final details. I used the smear tool to create the furry look in the white collar and the hat. I then brough the image back into Expression Design and added the black outline to make the character stand out from the background. You can see Elwë the lizzard dancing in the Monster Party at: www.studioaiko.com/MonstersParty.html

Please visit Studio Aiko and vote for one of the many cool characters in the Monster Party.

Get a 50% discount on Expression Studio, Expression Blend and Expression Web when you visit the Microsoft Store in the United States. Let’s begin 2009 with good deals and since economy is a hot topic right now, check out this limited time offer to get Expression Studio, Blend and Web at 50% their original cost. Expression Studio is $349.95, Expression Blend is $249.95 and Expression Web is $149.95. This offer is available in the U.S.

Now, let me tell you why you want to buy either of these 3 products. First of all, Expression Studio includes both Expression Blend 2 plus Expression Web 2, so that is already the cost of it. In addition however you get 3 additional products when you buy Studio. You get Expression Design 2, Expression Media 2 and Expression Encoder 2. Basically with these $349.95 you get the full design tool studio from Microsoft that can help you create Standards Based Websites, (HTML, ASP.NET, PHP), Silverlight 2 websites, WPF Windows applications, manage digital assets, encode and prepare video for the web and create stunning graphics. My advice, get Expression Studio, it’s a great deal and you can always update to the next versions of Studio.

Get Expression Blend is you are interested only in creating Silverlight and WPF applications. For many of you this is the case but basically for $100 more (Expression Studio) you web four additional products: Expression Web, Expression Encoder, Expression Design and Expression Media (all of these in version 2 of course)

Get Expression Web by itself if you are a previous or current user of Dreamweaver, Frontpage or other HTML website design tool. With Expression Web you will be able to create professional websites for your business or personal use. From small information sites based on standards to fully enabled rich media websites, Expression Web will help you design html based websites.

Upgrades from version 1 to version 2 of Studio, Blend and Web are also 50% off so this is the right time to upgrade.