Making high quality illustrations

I have been working wiht adobe PS CS2 and was wondering if you guys here could help me with this. I see t-shirt designs and general illustrations that have this really high quality look ot them and I cant sem to find a tutorial on how to make images like this. If you could give me even a general idea of what they are doing to make the letters look so shiny and the picture so perfect and smooth I would appreciate it. Im not new to adobe, I just dont know EVERYTHING.

Here is the picture I am talking about.............wait.........WHAT? we cant manage attatchments here?! dam.

http://www.johnlean.com/import_tuner_drift.htm

here is what im talkin about.

what they are doing

Basically using Illustrator. Most stuff seems drawn out simple gradients & masking (or meshes). A simple color transition gives that smooth look, where as in a photo you could have any number of colors in a gradient giving a very textured look.

This may get you started (using PS)
http://www.heathrowe.com/tuts/vector.asp

There's 2 reasons those pictures look so good :
1) Skill
2) Detail.

Other than that, they're probably fairly simple drawings.

thanks ill check it out. so you are pretty sure its using illustrator? you think they use a pen pad too?

They are almost certainly using a tablet for those illustrations. Either that, the guy scanned in hand drawn work, or he is really, really good at drawing with a mouse.

[QUOTE=skullsmasher]thanks ill check it out. so you are pretty sure its using illustrator? you think they use a pen pad too?[/QUOTE]

You don't need a pen pad to use Illustrator. A mouse will do just fine. All you need is practice with the pen tool. A little overwhelming at first, but pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. The finer details like gradient (especially mesh) can get tedious though.

personally, i think the keys to solid illustration are: know your colours, attetion to detail and patience.

really good illustrations are the ones that have very smooth colour transitions, be it a cell-shade illustration, or a photo-realistic mesh, or a combination of the two, the right colours will make any transition look better. a good example is skin colours, what you pick as the nutral colour, highlight and shadow determine how smooth it looks in the end.

the rest is just patience and being able to look at things in stages. beginning of an illustration might not look anything like you want it to in the end, but you have to realize it's only stage 1 of many.