I absolutely love this time of year! I figured I’d help get everyone in the Christmas spirit by sharing some awesome Christmas related tutorials I’ve found. Have a look, I hope you enjoy them!

Working in a creative field, such as design, can be taxing on the imagination. But there are some ways that have proven effective to folks who have faced these times, and come through them with success. And they all involve taking a mental five.

Liam McKay is a designer that is constantly growing and improving. Every design he creates seems to top the one prior. That’s impressive; and it’s something I always strive for in my own work. I’m stoked Liam agreed to this interview.

Every 50 new members to MyInkBlog Flickr group yields an inspirational post of the best work from that period. If you want to be a part of the next showcase, all you have to do is join up, and submit some fantastic design work. Also, if you missed the first two, be sure to checkout showcase I and II.

This tutorial covers the use of filters, brushes, the pen tool, masks, and maybe a couple other techniques; all in order to create a realistic sandwich bag from scratch.

I love discovering awesome Photoshop brushes. So it’s good news that I keep learning about new Photoshop brush sites. However, the market for any service can very quickly become over saturated with too much of the same. Despite the volume of these type of sites, I try to give each one a fair shake to see if they separate themselves in any manner.

This tutorial will cover a lot of ground (that may or may not be a bad play on words :) ). We will use both Illustrator and Photoshop to create a cool winter background. The focus will be showing you how to create custom patterns in Illustrator and custom brushes from these patterns in Photoshop. I think you’ll find a lot of these techniques very useful.

It’s been another fantastic month in the design blogosphere. Here’s my collection of the best articles, tutorials, freebies and more from the design community for the month of October. Enjoy!