Adobe Illustrator - Mark Howard Webster,

Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a very powerful program for creating digital graphic art. It's power comes from creating art using vector points, instead of pixels. In Photoshop you have to plan your project around the resolution (pixels per inch), but in Illustrator you can create resolution free graphics that will look good anywhere, from your web site or business card up to and including the side of a building.

Creating artwork in Illustrator is very much like creating an old fashioned montage with scissors and colored paper. In Illustrator your scissors is the pen tool, and your paper is the color picker.

This was a illustration style I learned in an Illustrator WOW for CS book. Woodcut artwork
has been around for centuries, Illustrator makes it easy — Cell Phone Driver

I got this little wooden guy so I could learn the proportions of the human form. After doing him in pencil, I though it
would be fun to do him in Illustrator. I drew him from life — Wooden Manikin

This fish was created using the gradient mesh tool. The mesh tool makes vector points behave like watercolor. It was a exercise in the Illustrator WOW textbook — Big Fish

I found this parrot on istockphoto.com and decided to use him for a lesson plan for my students — Orange Parrot

I thought this was so cool I purchased it on istockphoto.com to see how it was made. I decided to use it for a lesson plan for my students — Green Gears

I bought some straws for a birthday party. Looking at the box I realized it was created in Illustrator. Another lesson plan was born — Safeway Straws

This was a illustration style I learned in an Illustrator WOW for CS book. It uses the mesh tool to create watercolor like blends — Green Hills

Mick Flaaen is a friend and a former student. He needed a poster for his
latest movie. He had a little money, but mostly it looked like a fun way
to get in some good practice — Movie Poster

I purchased a $50 book called Creative Photoshop for CS4. This is an exercise I did where he has you
do the artwork with the path tool. My students enjoyed this, though they didn't like how long it took. — Paths in Photoshop

Another exercise from the book: Creative Photoshop for CS4. This was a lot of Photoshop pen work, but the results are cool — Yellow Dancer

I took my picture, and followed the directions in Creative Photoshop for CS4 to make this awesome
hollowed out spiral self portrait. Again it was a lot of pen work, mixed with pixel pushing — My spiral face

Classic Photoshop exercise where you transpose lips from one creature to another — Human Fish

I wrote and published a rock climbing guide book to Spire Rock in Spanaway. This
is from the second edition. I took the pictures and montaged them together — Spire Rock

Vladi modeled for the cover of the second edition of my book on Spire Rock. It is in Spanaway, Washington.
You can buy the book at www.edgeworksclimbing.com — Cover Spread

Photoshop

I first used Photoshop in 1996 when I brought a computer home for the first time. Photoshop was making waves back then for it's ability to alter photos. Unscrupulous journalists could modify photos so perfectly that it gave rise to a new saying: "I saw it on the internet, it must be true!" I rarely use Photoshop for anything other than optimizing images for the web. Because have my Canon 6D set to shoot a little flat, I typically pop the saturation a bit in raw. I also open the shadows (poor mans HDR) then run a pre-made action to create the 3 sizes of images my galleries require.

Mark Howard Webster
Creative

Menu

Adobe