Adventures in Illustrator Tutorials

For someone who is supposedly a Photoshop lover, I’m rather inept when it comes to adding textures to my illustrations. Actually, it’s something I hadn’t even really thought about. I’m glad I found this very cool tutorial from Photoshop Star–it gives a very tantalizing taste of the variety of effects that one can achieve with textures. Of course, the article does focus a lot on Photoshop (duh) but I’m certain that similar effects can be achieved in GIMP (which is free and really great).

It’s so cool how many free resources there are out there for wannabe digital artists like me. The cool tutorial from Photoshop Star linked to some Illustrator tutorials from Spoon Graphics and I’ve been learning tons about features that I didn’t ever think to take advantage of. Part of me is excited at how much there still is for me to learn about both Photoshop and Illustrator. Another part of me is kind of dizzy and overwhelmed at the realization that I’ll probably always have lots of cool tricks to dig up.

I made this little guy as kind of a modification of this monster tutorial from Spoon Graphics. I was going for kind of an old-school Pacman vibe. I guess this would be an homage to Pinky. He’s a pretty cute little guy.

Right now I’m working on this tutorial on how to make an icky octopus-type monster. Though it’s intended for beginners (I think I’m sort of intermediate) it’s still very cool to learn and practice new techniques. It really helps to keep the inspiration flowing.