IF:Time...possibly wasted?

Am i wasting my time, or am I using it wisely? Time will tell...This is yet another image for Shutterstock - a site for clip-art, vector images, and photographs.

I just learned out about the blend tool in Illustrator. If you don't use Illustrator then you don't know how hard it is using the gradient tool. It's so incredibly unfriendly. But then my wife (who is also hard at work to create images...we gotsta make our riches one quarter at a time) told me about a new technique she just learned. Basically you take a lighter color on top of a darker color and you can use the blend tool to mesh them together...and it makes a nice perfect gradient. IN ILLUSTRATOR! I was wasting so much time doing it the other way...and I could never have ended up with an image that looked this photorealistic (obviously you can tell it's still an illustration, which is the point, but it looks a hell of a lot realer than the last two images I did.)

my drawings aren't usually this sexy...

Now obviously this isn't my normal illustration style or way ...but I'm experimenting with different techniques and styles to see what kind of vector images will sell. So far we've covered candy, art deco backgrounds, cute vector animals, a bed, palm trees, a kiddy pool, - quite a variety of images. We figure the more we have up, and the better the images, the more downloads we'll have.

Anyway - if you have images, especially vector images, you can upload them to shutterstock and start making money off of them!

And because I told you - use this link - http://submit.shutterstock.com/?ref=325258 - so that way you get your quarter (per download) but I get 3 cents!

Now - it sounds stupid - because what're ya gonna do with a quarter? The guy that recommended me to the site (I actually found the info on his website through illustration friday) has a couple of pieces that pull in the thousands of downloads. And he consistantly makes a few thousand each month. And that's for images that would otherwise just be sitting on your computer doing nothing. I'm making my quarters...you should too...unless you don't have vector images...then nevermind.