7 tools illustrator beginners will be interested to use

I usually use illustrator for manual vector work (when I say 'manual', I am referencing the new image trace features in CS6) but I love to design colourful website backdrops, especially using these awesome tools. If you you are a beginner with Illustrator, I'm sure you will love this.

1. Bring up the sub menu of the icon that looks like an upside down moustache and select a tool. Here's a demo of those tools. (in order)

Warp Tool

 Twirl Tool (one of my favs)

 Pucker Tool

 Bloat Tool

 Scallop Tool

 Crystallise Tool (good for comic book stuff)

 Wrinkle Tool (makes for good sound-wave pictures)

 Enjoy!

Below is something I made using a few of these tools.

Fotor: A good enough replacement for Photoshop.

Fotor is free at the moment on the mac app store... grab it. I know a lot of people have written about it online but when I tested it out myself I had to share.

What Fotor is: A good and powerful way to edit photos WITHOUT adjusting any sliders or graphs, panels and colours. It's probably what you would imagine if you mixed Elements 10, with iPhoto and the Snapseed iPad app in a big mixing bowl...

It has an easy drag and drop interface:

A huge selection of well described menu items:

And another sidebar for selecting different sub menus, and export features:

It has gained its place next to Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock. On the whole: I think this is a great app for on-the-go photographers who don't have the time to open Photoshop and setup for an editing sesh.