I am now writing regular columns for the iStock vector illustration home page, called “Points & Paths.” 
I am also writing a monthly Illustrator tutorial for Vector Tuts:
So that’s keeping me pretty busy. If I think of something that doesn’t fit in those two places, I’ll post it here. Thanks for reading!
Hold down the Option key when erasing, and you’ll get a marquee that you can drag to erase a perfectly rectangular area:
Yesterday, Sept, 23, was Adobe’s big rollout of CS4. I spent the day moving my office to anther room in the house and trying to remember how to put my desk back together. However, you can check out some video tutorials I did for Layers magazine’s CS4 Learning Center. These demonstrate some of the new features in the latest release. More to come!
Let’s say you have a gradient-filled object. For whatever reason, you want to duplicate the look of the gradient, but you want it to be a Gradient Mesh. Do you laboriously start from scratch and fill in every single point on the mesh?
No! Simply rasterize the object (Object>Rasterize), then choose Object>Create Gradient Mesh…
Make sure to choose “Flat” in the Mesh dialog box, and enter the number of rows and columns suitable for your object.
You may have to do a little touch-up around the edges, but it’s way better than doing the whole thing, one point at a time.