Fairly decent.
Not a half-bad tutorial. But you made one of your techniques much, much more complicated than it really is. You can do the second technique, the one where it appears to be a gradient moving in from the edges, can be accomplished with much less time and much less information, and too much information will ssllooww down the animation when you play it back. You can achieve the exact same effect with a gradient! (you can adjust them in the COLOR panel) Often, gradients are frowned upon, because they are usually used in the wrong way. But if you look at Adam Phillips' work (prowlies at the river, littlefoot, the yuyu) very carefully, you will notice that he uses gradients quite a lot, but in such a way that they look natural.