I've been having to produce a ton of icons recently in Illustrator and I wanted to share my latest production breakdown. Normally I trace out all of my vector shapes meticulously with the pen tool and create custom gradients for tones - to save time I've started free handing all of my shapes with the pencil tool and instead of gradients have been using a limited palette of flat colors that ultimately blend together when viewed at final scale. Normally an illustration like this could take over an hour but this one came together in 20-30 min.