Was just playing to take a break from paper work and coding. Flower was created by rotating an oval shape, then uniting them in pathfinder. I made three flower shapes to be able to add drop shadows to each. The most inner flower was filled with a multicolor gradient and went through texturizer (Effects > Texture > Stained Glass). Same effect was used for the circle.
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Wanted to play with 3D text for a long time. I vaguely followed this tutorial: Design Soft Stylized 3D Type. Tried to keep it close to 15 minutes, so didn’t go through all steps 
That’s officially my very first pink design.
I think someone here posted the link to the Abstract Vector Art tutorial. Or maybe not. Anyway, it made me realize that I’ve been neglecting the warp tool and its companions for way too long, so I decided to give them a try.
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This is an Illustrator thingy. I think what I did was this: used a vector shape of a bird, put a sunset photo in the layer below, made the bird a clipping mask, added teh same bird shape below, filled it with black and modified it a bit, added a black rectangle below the photo layer, applied a series of effects to the black rectangle (I went back and forth between several and honestly don’t remember where I ended), then added inner glow to the rectangle. Was just playing.
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Today’s small discovery: China marker works way better as a highlight preserver than white charcoal or pastel (I made trunks and branches with it). Also, some Dervent pastel pencils of earthy variety act more like colored pencils then pastel. Since this sketch was done mainly by blending colors with a dry brush, the second discovery was not pleasant. Moral: test on scrap paper first (yeah, fresh idea, I know).
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I wanted to see how Prismacolor charcoal pencils will play with the mysterious cardstock that I got at Michaels long time ago. I say”mysterious” because the package is long gone, and I have no idea what the brand is. It turned out better than I expected – apparently, the paper is quite durable and allows for many layers of blending and crosshatching.
Not sure about time; I was interrupted more than once, but it’s probably somewhere within 15 minutes.
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All Photoshop posts here made me realize that I never actually played with Photoshop filters. I mean, just playing for the sake of it, not using filters to improve/correct a photo. So here goes:
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My symbol spray tool went wonky, and this image was at first a place to test the tool and try to fix it. Fixing didn’t happen (and I haven’t came to terms with the necessity of wiping out Illustrator preferences yet), but I thought I would try to pull something positive out of the frustrating experience. Took about 20 minutes to complete. The time spent in a battle with the spray tool does not count.
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