My wonderful Father-in-Law got me a Wacom drawing tablet for Christmas this year. They are amazing tools to work with. It allows for more control, and pressure sensitivity with brushes in Photoshop. It will take some getting use to and a lot of practice; however, I'm already loving it. These are a few quick practice drawings I did.  

These are some hipster snowflakes that took inspiration from Trader Joe's Christmas Bag. I drew them, and used Abode Capture to make vectors of them. Adobe Capture is a great tool I use all the time to move things drawn by hand into Illustrator. The files for each snowflake are below. 

This was an image I made for my employer's Christmas party. The typefaces are Starshine and Futura.
Colors:

• Background R: 192 G: 192 B: 176
• Light Green R: 147 G: 179 B: 167
• Dark Green R: 102 G: 137 B: 122
• Red R: 207 G: 79 B: 67  
  

Below I have put the Ai files of the tree branches. Feel free to use them on your christmas project.  

Teela Cunningham of Every - Tuesday has some great tutorials on graphic design. They are very easy and fun to do. Here is one on transforming typography into shape. The image below was my go at it.  This was my first time really using the pen tool in Illustrator. The pen tool is definitely tricky to lean; however just by doing this exercise I stated to get a better grasp of it.