Lynda.com has a free 24 Hour pass offer available. Not sure how long the offer will be around but if you have a day with some free time then you should sign up and watch some of those free Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator or other tutorials free! There is some great stuff there and I feel lucky to have access to a subscription provided by my job. Well worth a look. 

Check it out >>

I just add a new "The Art of Casual Games" page to the Reference & Inspiration section.

I like finding little artwork 'gems.' It seems most of the oohs and ahhs are reserved for big budget video games. Still, I have seen some very nice work in many casual and adventure games.

It's a good idea to look for inspiration in as many different places as possible so check out the link for a look at some nice -and often overlooked- artwork.

The Art of Casual Games II

I had to do some photo stiching today. Since time was short and there was some distortion I decided to see if there were any free tools that could save me some time.

I found ICE at Microsoft Research and it did the job fine. You can see the two original images above and the stitched panorama. Took only a couple minutes automated crunching and spit it out.

I found an interesting site by chance today. It is called Issuu and it seems to have a lot of free content. Try a search for Illustrator, Photoshop, Artist or Games for example and there seems to be free magazines. books and other documents. It'll take my a while to sort it all out but figured I'd post it so you can explore too.

Feature rich free backup software (via @thurrott) -now you have no excuse not to backup those art files; hard to believe this is free.

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