Here is a really amazing blog with many, many free Photoshop plug-in downloads that can make life a lot easier and faster.

Pre-made Photoshop brushes make life so much easier. Here are some of my favorite places to download brush packs:

The combination of exploring freelance graphic design and being incredibly slow and bored at work has caused me to want to learn Adobe Illustrator. I found this tutorial blog written by Tony Soh, creator of www.vectordiary.com called Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days. It consists of several exercise that teach you the ins and outs of all of the basic tools and elements of Illustrator. The final challenge is creating a logo which puts most of the skills you learned to the test. I found it to  be exactly what I needed to familiarize myself with the program and it was much faster than trying to just play around with it myself. One of the most helpful tutorials was actually a link to extra help that he had in the Pen Tool tutorial. At the bottom of this blog, there is a link to download the Pen Tool Exercise. You open the file in Illustrator and it shows you exactly where to click and drag to trace the outline of the word VECTOR. After doing it once with the “follow the dots”, I turned the direction layer off and traced it myself. I found this to be so helpful in understanding how to make curved lines. All in all, if you are trying to learn Illustrator, I highly recommend starting here.

This site is awesome. They have hundreds of textures that are extremely useful when it comes to rendering surfaces in SketchUp or Photoshop. For example, you can browse by material, say metal, there are several sub categories to choose from, we will select Bronze & Copper which has 46 textures to choose from. The particular type I chose then had 5 slightly different versions of the image. You can then download a small, medium, or large version of the image. Here is the result:

this guy is ridiculous. A lot of people give him a hard time for what he does saying that photorealism is a non-art. I love it though