So first of all, I just expanded the brush and then I joined all the objects. The snowflake has a simple shape with complicated brush. Here is my example, how I save several kilobytes on the snowflake illustration.

The solution is merging of such shapes into one shape (use the first Shape Mode in Pathfinder palette). Sometimes the illustration contains a lot of small overlapping objects with same color – like the blades of grass, snowflakes on the ground and others. If you use transparency on gradients, just remove the gradients or the transparency and the size should be much smaller. too complicated objects (traced objects from photos, etc).using transparency or blending modes (overlay, screen,…) with gradients.The main reasons, why the EPS files are so big are: If your illustration is too complicated and uses transparency and special effects (blur, shadows, blending modes) and you don’t want to simplify it, you can only generate big JPG version and sell it in bitmap format for example on Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Fotolia (read more about selling graphics on microstock sites). Well this is not the right answer (there are better in this article), but sometimes there is no another option. What can you do, to make the EPS file smaller? Here you will find several tips and tricks for reducing the EPS file size.

Sometimes it happens to everyone – you create a really cool vector illustration and want it to submit and sell on microstock, but you found, that the exported EPS file is too big.

How to compress a pdf in illustrator