All 3 of these struck me as being very interesting, perhaps useful but most of all quite easy.

Dripping Text

Photoshop Seminar – The Water Effect

Photoshop Facelift – Creating blood soaked eyes tutorial.

Olieng.net recommended these brushes from Celestial Star during one of his tutorials.

Coghillustration is probably the first and last place you will sea a gorilla holding a movie camera.

Brad Fitzpatrick has more than just an awesome Flash demo reel.

You The Designer has a varied array of wonderful vector art.

Wow, Aviary appears to be awesome.  I’m still convinced that stuff like this is entirely up the artist’s limitations.

Scribus — Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Inkscape — An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

Mozilla SVG Project — this one is for the geeks.

I didn’t really like the majority of these Photoshop tutorials but Eyes on Design definitely knocked it out of the park with Emilie.

“A Gradient Tutorial” on the 9rules site actually explains some finer points of gradients and it struck a chord with me.  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve made drastically contrasted gradients and been sorely disappointed with them — this article fills the gaps.

Here’s a site I’ve never found before and an absolute gem of a tutorial.

Photoshop Tutorial: Ray of Lights Effect – I’d call this “large feathered” rays.

Make Light Rays in Photoshop – for some odd reason “crystal sponge” first came to mind.  I would go with “crystal explosion” or “burst.”

Burst of Rays – definitely more of a cartoon effect or “wallpaper cliché.”

I found a few Andy Warhol-esque tutorials while searching for good information on HDR (of which there is not much).

Photoshop Tutorial: How to Create Andy Warhol Inspired Pop Art

Andy-Warhol-Up Your Photographs

Only because this next one is free I won’t bother to say how much it sucks.

Photoshop Serigraphs — remember though the only thing wrong with this technique (in my opinion) is that it is limited by the artist — which could be you.

Additional Links:

http://www.fotoview.nl/

Here is that “fake HDR” link that was down for the longest time.  This link has a plugin you can purchase as well, but first it offers the entire step-by-step process.

Here is someone’s attempt at the first link.  Make sure to click the images so you can see the higher resolution ones — the smaller ones are horrible.

Here is a custom script for The GIMP that fakes HDR.  The script was based off of this article. 
I must say some of the images from the article are horrid so I’d
recommend some hue and saturation reduction if your images appear too
red (or magenta).

http://www.mediachance.com/hdri/fakehdr.html, and /plugins/redynamix.html and /hdri/index.html

…contain further information and a custom plugin to handle everything for you.

Here is another one of those “register to see this content” crap: http://www.deke.com/content/the-fake-hdr-portrait-technique-revealed

Tutorial9 (formerly GreyCobra) has the absolute best in tutorials.

Flash Game Design has an amazing set of tutorials as well.