Santa Claus Is Coming To Town "You better watch out You better not cry Better not pout I'm telling you why Santa Claus is coming to town He's making a list And checking it twice; Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice Santa Claus is coming to town He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows if you've been bad or good So be good for goodness sake! O! You better watch out! You better not cry Better not pout I'm telling you why Santa Claus is coming to town Santa Claus is coming to town" -lyrics of the original song- Here you are two videos with the song "Santa Is Coming To Town". One is by Bruce Springsteen, and the other by Bon Jovi. With these videos I wanna wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and my best wishes for my readers :) And remember that Santa only comes with good rock.

The depictions of Christmas not only change depending on the author, but also with the times, or the message. Albeit in the past the emphasis was on Nativity as it's obvious, with the pass of centuries it has evolved to themes like snow, presents... Anyway, a feeling of love, generosity, and union is still present. And let's hope that this won't change too much. Filippo Lippi Rafael Sanzio Bartolome Murillo Brueguel the elder Adolph Tidemand Carl Larsson Albert Chevalier Tayler Charles Burchfield Thomas Nast's Margaret Evans Price

In these dates that are so close to Christmas, it's unavoidable to watch some movie or TV series based on a novel by Charles Dickens. His tenderness, his sensibility, and his analysis of the human essence make him an irresistible author. Charles Dickens was born on February 7th 1812, in a modest family with many children (he had 9 brothers), and as in many of his books, with many economical problems. His father was an alcoholic, very fond to gambling, and the quantity of debts accumulated joined with so many mouths to feed brought Charles Dickens, his mother and his brothers to suffer big economical difficulties. Since he was a very little child he had to work to help in his home, in a shoe factory. He couldn't go to school since he was nine, but his desire to better himself and his love for knowledge made him become a brilliant self-taught mind. When he was 15, he worked as a messenger for a law firm. He rose to the post if secretary of one of the lawyers of the firm, and later he became journalist of the Parliament, writing descriptions of the happenings. He signed his works with the pseudonym of "Boz". But he always wanted to write novels. He started to work as a writer publishing chapters of his novels, and the public appreciated them. He did a series of works that were illustrated by great artists like George Cruikshank, Robert Seymour, or H.K. Browne (Phiz). These works were very praised and influential in his times. Charles Dickens never forgot his modest origins. His compromised attitude was always reflected both in his works as in his social life, becoming the administrator of some charity organizations, and in his fight for civil rights, and against slavery. Another one of his social battles was to fight to reach an international agreement about intellectual property rights for authors and artists. In 1843, he published "A Christmas Carol", that quickly became a classic tale for children in these Christmas date. A classic that has reached our days. For some time, he directed a theater company, and his novels were successfully spread in England and the United States, and through the whole world. He died in 1870, leaving us literary jewels like "Oliver Twist", "David Copperfield", "A Christmas Carol", "Dombey and Son"... Charles Dickens was a writer that never forgot the hard beginnings of his life, and denounced the human miseries with the wish to show human shortcomings to his readers, and make them be better.

I have released a premium set of Photoshop brushes that contains 150 snowflakes, that are available in exclusive on my new Renderosity store, at a starting price of $6.50 only. If you liked the free set, here you are a much bigger set and with higher quality. In addition to the snowflakes, there are some Christmas ornaments. Renderosity is a portal of resources for professionals of graphics design, and digital art both in 2D and 3D. Many of the resources that are offered there are used for computer games and professional design and illustration. In Renderosity you can find Photoshop brushes, layers, backgrounds, landscapes, panoramas, and Poser characters, clothes for them... Both if you're a professional of graphics design or not, it's interesting to have a look. For a professional like me, it's very interesting to sell resources to other professionals that can use them to create their artworks. Some of them have already purchased these brushes of mine and I was able to watch their works, and I'm really impressed and proud of having them as customers.

I've done these Photoshop brushes. They are snowflakes, and snowflakes with glows. And I want to share them with you. Download them for free, but before please read and understand the terms of use. Terms of use These brushes are free to use in commercial and non-commercial designs, as long as you follow these conditions: - The brushes can't be sold. You can sell the designs you make with the brushes, but not the brushes themselves. - They must be downloaded clicking the links from this article in blog.emmaalvarez.com. If you like the brushes and want your visitors to download them, place a link to this post, so they come and download them from here. Don't directly link them. - You can't redistribute the brushes without my explicit consent. If you want to pack them in a clipart library, cd or dvd, or anything else, ask me first. - You can't claim these brushes as yours. - Don't use these brushes in racist, sexist, hateful or blaspheme works. - You can link back and name blog.emmaalvarez.com in your website or designs, but it's not required, although I will appreciate it. Snowflakes Click here to download

These lists are the result of many hours of work. If you're a regular reader, this compilation will be very useful for you, as you will have all the lists gathered together. Or maybe you've missed some. And if you're not a regular reader, here you are a compilation of resources for design and developing that will be of great help for your computer and projects. Although this kind of lists are not going to be published here anymore (by the reasons explained in this article), this is a list of the best ones that were published during 2008. Photoshop Top Best 55 Photoshop Tutorials For Professional Photographers Some people think that photo retouching started with Photoshop. But it may be more precise to say that photo retouching started with photography. Doesn't matter if you are a professional photographer or amateur, here you are all the techniques that are mastered by all the professional photographers of the world. 50 Free Photoshop Gradient Sets Light and shadow effects improve your graphics and make them look more realist. Gradients have this function too. Using gradients in some areas can turn a simple graphic into a 3D one, and they also break the monotony. In this list you will find many gradient sets of high quality. They are 50 sets, and they are free, but remember to read the license terms before using them. 50 Free Photoshop Pattern Sets Photoshop patterns are often used both in graphics design as well as in digital art. They allow you to repeat patterns and fill the areas that you like quickly and easy. In this list, you can find patterns of fire, Christmas, floral, Saint Valentine, stone... and many more. They are 50 free Photoshop pattern sets, but don't forget to read the license terms. Adobe Illustrator 65 Adobe Illustrator Tutorials It's important to master vector graphics drawing. The images that you get don't loose quality when they are scaled. It doesn't matter if it has the size of an icon, it can cover a wall too, when talking about a vector graphic. Illustrator is Adobe's main software for vector graphics. Here you are a series of 65 tutorials that will be your source to learn new techniques, or your source of inspiration and ideas. Flash 56 Flash Tutorials Flash is one of the most used animation programs. It is useful for animating both vector graphics as well as bitmaps. Some go even further and create complete web pages entirely with Flash. Mac Top Best 55 Mac OS X Free And Opensource Software Many designers use Macintosh for working. Its software tends to be very visually attractive and usable, but it's not easy to find free software for Mac, so there was the need to do a list just for it. Ubuntu Top Best 50 Ubuntu Opensource Applications For Design And Developing The users of Ubuntu have a big range of software to choose and install, but it's hard to choose what software is the best for your needs. This list hopes to help to choose the right software, and here is what I think is the best Ubuntu software for designers and developers. 50 More Ubuntu Apps For Design And Developing These programs can be run in any Linux system, but this list is called as Ubuntu apps because they can be installed with Synaptic directly or are already prepared to be installed as .deb packages. Free Fonts More Than 150,000 Free Fonts And Dingbats This list contains more than 150,000 free fonts and dingbats. Its purpose is to compile together the best sites. Use it as your main bookmark for finding good fonts. For Webmasters And Bloggers Top best 50 free tools for your website As a professional of design, I know how hard is to find good free tools. I think it's very important that the applications you use are easy to use. Most of the people don't have the time and patience to read many tutorials to understand how a program works. Here you are 50 of the best. I hope you like them. Top Best 50 Freeware For Design and Developing Finding freeware for design and programming can be a hard task. Here there are 50 of the best. By using these programs, your projects will have a superior quality. Some of them will save you a big amount of time. Maybe you never thought in using some of them. But they will surprise you so much, that you won't be able to avoid testing them. Top Best 50 Free Apps For Designers And Webmasters Sometimes big companies have started making small and free applications, that with the support of their users have become big software projects. To support the new software designers and programmers means to better the market. But sometimes the great quality of free applications surprises you. You can even notice that they are much better than others that are commercial. To help these genial creators is to improve the system. Top Best 50 Blogger & Wordpress Customizations Tips ( Hacks ) Applying hacks like those in this list, you can have all those visual effects and features that almost everybody wants in his/her blog: rotating images in header, random quotes, social bookmarking buttons, background musics, smilies, 3 columns templates... to name a few. Most Useful 50 CSS Tips And Tools For Webmasters The style of a website is defined by the CSS. CSS describes text fonts, if images must have borders or shadows, etc. Simply changing the CSS styles, you can change the appearance of your website completely, without changing the contents (text, images...). Recommended 55 Free Online Tools Lately, the number of free online tools has grown enormously. Many of these tools are really original and useful. These services help you to do tasks that you would never imagine doing in such an easy and quick way. Firefox Top Best 50 Firefox Extensions For Web Design Each day there are more people that use Firefox. It is much faster than Internet Explorer, and has a lot of extensions and themes. Regarding the extensions, many of them are much more than interesting. Some of them ease the work of designers and developers. The 60 Firefox Extensions That Will Make You Forget IE Firefox is a concept of browser much superior to Internet Explorer. IE was born just to browse pages, and although it has some extensions, they can't be compared to those that Firefox has. Graphics And Icons More Than 100,000 Free Icons No more you'll need to search for icons, as here you'll find more than 100,000 for free. Best Sites Where To Find Free Glitter Graphics Glitters graphics are a way to turn a boring message into a surprising, creative and fun message. They are used both in social networks and emails. Twitter 60 Recommended Twitter Tools In this moment, Twitter is one of the most fashionable tools in Internet and outside Internet. Many people connect to Twitter from their mobile phones, iPods...Without a doubt, this list can help you to get the most of Twitter.