Grant Friedman of Colorburned contacted me last week to create a Tweet This icon for the wonderful site redesign of Colorburned. In turn, Grant created an exclusive set of Illustrator multi-colored paint brushes for Vectips! Download the set and have some fun playing aroung with them. I also suggest checking all of Grant’s awesome brushes at Colorburned.

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Lately, I have been working on some children illustrations, creating some über cute creatures. In the following easy tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a cute panda bear face icon all from ellipses (well, actually there is one rectangle for the background). The great part about this tutorial, is that you can easily apply the techniques to other icons, illustrations, logos, or other projects.

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After reading Lensco’s comment “Cool tip, all we need now are gradients on strokes. Pretty please, Adobe?” on the previous tutorial Quick Tutorial: Adding Gradients to Text, I decided to write a quick tutorial about how I create gradient strokes. This super simple technique use the Appearance panel and effects to create editable gradient strokes in Illustrator.

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I’m sure a bunch of you have seen this technique before in other blogs or are already aware of how to add gradients to text, but it is worth mentioning for those that don’t know this technique. Moreover, I found that adding an extra step to this known technique, enables you add transparent gradients to text in Illustrator CS4 while still keeping the text editable!

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When creating the previous Create Sketchy-Style Vectors tutorial, I created a number of brushes. I started playing around with the brushes and was happy with the results. I ended up create more of the brushes so I can distribute them. These brushes are great for creating sketchy or grungy vectors. Just apply the brushes to any path or object!

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Illustrator is great for creating clean and precise illustrations, but some of the time you don’t want clean and precise. There are many illustrations that call for a sketchy or hand-drawn feel. Creating these effects are relatively easy with Illustrator’s Live Trace, Live Paint, Brushes and the ability to create you own brushes. Check out some of my sketchy illustrations on iStock for more inspiration.

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This post is an extension of my Watercolor Vector Flower Illustration tutorial that appears on VectorTuts.com. If you haven’t checked out the post, you should now! In the following tutorial I will explain how to create a couple watercolor brushes, adding to the VectorTuts tutorial, and at the end of the tutorial you can download some Free Vectips Watercolor Brushes!

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